The "Are Fingerprints A Thing Of The Past?" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading a story that appeared in the Smithsonian magazine over a year ago titled "The Myth of Fingerprints."  Story began telling about a robbery in Orange, California where a man had his car, MacBook Air and his headphones stolen.  Police arrived and swabbed the crime scene for DNA.  The story went on to say that using DNA techniques was normally used to solve high-profile crimes, but not routine robberies.  It seems today that DNA is being used to solve many more crimes than it used to help solve.  Police for years and years would use fingerprints to help in solving crimes.  For centuries it was known that the loops and "whorls" that decorated a person's fingertips was perhaps the best way to solve certain crimes.  At first mugshots were one of the main ways to solve a crime and then using fingerprints became the best way to solve a crime.  And then, the head of identification for the local police department in Bengal, India developed an elegant system that categorized prints into subgroups based on their pattern types such as loops and whorls.  It worked so well that a police officer could find a match in minutes instead of the hours as needed before.  That was back in 1901!  Using fingerprints to catch the bad guy has become standard, since fingerprints are an inviolable, immutable truth in catching the bad guy.  Fingerprints don't lie and a fingerprint expert has facts that can't be argued, at least not often.  It was said that no two people have the same fingerprints, but then if was found that fingerprinting wasn't as rock solid as many thought it was.  How many points of similarity should two prints have before an expert analyst can say for sure that they match?  If the prints you lift from a crime scene are the slightest bit blurred, incomplete or unclear, it could cause problems in matching a suspected criminal.  In 1985 a suspect was arrested for murder and spent 13 months in jail before the print analyst realized he had made a mistake.  Then in 1991 a federal judge in California became suspicious of fingerprint analysts who'd testified in a bank robbery trial.  The judge was amazed that the standard for declaring that two prints matched varied widely from county to county.  He threw out the fingerprint evidence from the bank robbery trial.  DNA evidence began in the mid-1980s and received a slightly higher level of skepticism.  To some judges it was something from a science fiction film.  But, over the years DNA quickly gained a reputation for helping free wrongly accused as well as proving beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of a person.  I have written before about a local Disc Jockey who murdered a young teacher in her apartment in 1992.  A Lancaster County police detective suspected a man named Raymond Charles Rowe.  The police department never gave up trying to prove their case.   Recently the Lancaster County District Attorney hired a private company to find the young woman's relatives and obtain DNA samples.  The police then obtained, legally, a sample of the original suspect's DNA and Viola!  He was proven guilty!  DNA evidence, as of now, seems to be foolproof.  The Smithsonian article also told of other types of evidence that through science may prove to be helpful.  The use of a camera to take photos of a person's eye socket, nose, chin and other features and turn them into a 3D mugshot is fairly accurate.  Same goes for using sound waves and light rays to map the shape and size of the outer ear.  Our voice creates a "voiceprint" that could be used, but the iris seems to be even more helpful.  Infrared light shows retinal blood vessels in specific patterns, but in many of these techniques, you have to have the same information from the suspect before you can compare results.  Other items such as odor, gait and size of the pinkie finger may someday help in solving crimes.  Only time will tell, I guess.  Isn't science fun!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.