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so when are fingerprints junk science or foolproof evidence ??

well all accordin to what you wanna believe ( not prove mind you now but believe ) it can be wrong as much as 4 out of five times .. get your attention did it ? yeah me too .. seems they have accepted fingerprints as foolproof for so long nobody has ever questioned it till lately .. just saw somethin on frontline where they asked all the right questions and it blew my mind .. seems that one fingerprint expert said that most csi experts can be subconsciously prejudgemental and if you change a few things about the suspect and have them do the fingerprints again blindly they'll reverse their first results 4 out 5 times .. same guy doin the testin and the same suspect but change a little bit of his backround and while they didn't know they were the one who said 100% sure he was the one the first time would reverse their own 100% guilty from the evidence 4 out of 5 times .. and the same goes for these dentists that go by dental impressions .. while they didn't come out and say that fingerprints were total junk science what they did say was that some guys would go by 7 points others by 12 points and others by 16 points and so on .. there is no standard they have to use to match your prints to someone elses at a crime scene .. and you'd think that its bein done by computer wouldn't you ?? yeah i woulda too . but nope .. its done by the human eye just like in the days of old .. maybe if they did come up with a computer scanner to pick them out like a face recognition program they might get it closer to the truth but i'm sure that even that can be fooled .. i remember when i had my video store i was on computer from the getgo and i had all the tapes barcoded .. had a scanner to read the barcodes .. very high tech for the times .. now its everyday comonplace but back then it was cuttin edge.. and in the 9 years i had the store i only saw it read one barcode wrong .. just one .. and there were days i'd rent 300 tapes .. and on days i didn't rent that many i might return that many so there were always a lot of tapes bein scanned everyday .. i had two computers hooked up together at the counter with their own scanners and screens so 52 thousand tapes goin out and 52 thousand commin back in a year wouldn't be a stretch.. and to only get one wrong scan is remarkable .. and if you saw the barcodes they all look so much alike it would boggle your mind .. i remember this guy opened up a store right across the street from me .. him and his blonde girlfriend .. so i went over there and it turns out they have the same exact computer program as me and i'm watchin this blonde and she's typin in all the numbers not scannin em in and i asked her why don't you use the scanner ?? and she said we don't  need the scanner i never make a mistake when i type .. i said oh really ?? you won't be here long with that attitude .. and sure enough people started commin to me about bein blamed for rentin tapes they never rented and couldn't possibly be late with so soon after they closed up shop ..the story is a bit more involved than this but the short version is a few years later i get a phone call from this girl who wants to sell her video store . she was out in vegas for a few years and now she's tired of the video biz and wants out and would i be interested .. so i said what do you have to sell ?? are you on computer ?? what kinda program all that kinda stuff and she said oh yeah its all on the computer and they had a microbiz program .. so i said gee thats the same program i have .. do you have the scanner for it too i asked and she said no we didn't need it because we never make mistakes when we type things in and out .. i said ya know i been doin this for 7 years now and i only met one other person dumb enough to say somethin like that and she used to be across the street from me but went outta business cause they pissed so many people off and she said well i used to have a store in n. ft. myers .. all i could say was bingo .. anyway my point is if you can screw up puttin numbers in a computer and maybe she was pretty good and only missed 1 number out of every 100 which would put her at 99% that still means that a few times a week she's gonna get it wrong and thats a conservative number .. why would these fingerprint readers who do it by eye be any better ??   whew !!!!!!  sure took the long way to get that all out but it was the best analogy i could think of .. so don't always believe what you see on csi . there are people who have degrees that came from schools that never fail anyone .. and so much of it is not proven scientifically .. is anyone surprised by all this ??  

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Also most scientific methodology is based on induction/inference so it results in probability and not certainty except in some cases where mathematics and deduction are the basis.  Statistical things like the likelihood of one having the same print of someone else are based on likelihood and not certainty. Even in DNA they talk in terms of "one out of."  Still, it is something to go on. Occasionally a lawyer will challenge the science of DNA testing as well. These things have there downside but are an improvement over the old investigative technique known as torture. That one was said to be 100% effective as everyone always confessed. 

It's the myth of fingerprints (P. Simon)

ahh but you didn't read the whole thing pat .. its still done by eye .. not by computer .. we all see csi and think thats what they do .. and its not .. see what i wrote .. and thats why i was shocked .. i just took it for gospel that if they had fingerprints it was a done deal .. and its not .. its not a science either.. science is somethin you can do over and over and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt .. fingerprints are not ..you can have the same guy say yeah its a match and no its not when they look at it again .. it might not even be 50/50 .. its a complete myth as uno says .. 

I thought they were always trying to match up fingerprints with the FBI database on computer, must be the books I read.

No I wouldn't trust an eyeball reading at all, to easy to want something to match. I didn't realize this was happening, If I were accused of something based on fingerprints I would protest like mad.

well accordin to frontline somebody must be readin them prints .. not the computer .. altho rose said she saw the thing from frontline too a couple of years ago so what i saw might have been the same one . and maybe they updated how they get their conclusions now ?? but if thats the truth then i'd think that frontline would have put an update at the end .. but there wasn't one .. they do have the prints on a computer .. but the computer isn't the one to match them .. thats done by a live person who went to school .. but the freaky thing is there is no standard as to how you match one set of prints to another .. and anyone can get a degree to be a fingerprint expert .. anyone .. just take the course and pay the fee and you're an expert .. how would you like some 19 year old kid with absolutely no experience at all to be the one to point the fickle finger at you as the guilty party when you weren't even in town on the night in question ? and you have 14 eyewitnesses ?? but they are all negated cause he's a fingerprint expert .. for all of 15 minutes .. and its admitted in court as such .. our fingerprint expert says she is the one ..100% sure .. i think most juries would convict with evidence like that .. and they have .. hundreds of times .. have they been right ?? maybe sometimes they have been .. but sometimes they haven't and dna has proven that .. makes you wonder how many guys were sittin on death row sayin i didn't do it and then the dna comes out that he didn't .. i think if they made it a prosecutable offence for a da to withhold or fabricate evidence they'd be a lot more careful what they do and don't do in court .. i'm sure most of em are just tryin to do their job .. but i'm also sure that some of em are just thinkin about their record of wins vs. losses .. and they wanna win.. no matter what .. they wanna win .. and it shouldn't be about that .. it should be about the truth .. win lose or draw it should be about the truth ..  

AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) was used everywhere I worked. Fingerprints were scanned in to see if there was a match, then human expert verified to make sure. There was/is a definitive number of points that had to match in order for a fingerprint to be verified as a match. The departments I worked with always went with a higher number of match points than required.

You know there are a lot of "experts" who earn their keep by poking h
Holes in the established theories and practices in order to make money. I'm not saying it's impossible for human error to occur, I just wouldn't be surprised at all if the experts on Dateline don't have their own biases//prejudices coming into play. THEY get paid for poking holes in the State's proof after all and if they didn't, they wouldn't make any money.

well its about time you chimed in micky ..i figured this one would bring you out cause this is your area of expertise... look at this and tell me if this is all wrong or not .. this is the frontline piece i watched .. tell me what they said that was untrue cause it really has me wonderin .. 

http://video.pbs.org/video/2223977258/

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