According to the article “Fingerprints: Infallible Evidence?” the FBI rely too much on the fingerprints. It is easy to make a mistake, especially with fingerprints. There was a case with Rick Jackson and he was accused of murdering his friend. The police said that they had his bloody fingerprints at the crime scene and that was the reason why they arrested him. Jackson’s attorney decided to call his own experts one of which who was a retired FBI examiner to look over the evidence, and when he did he said they did not match at all. The second expert who had over 75 years of fingerprint experience has said the same thing, that it is not even a close match. Usually police lift off only a partial of a fingerprint at the crime scenes, and they can be contaminated or distorted. Most examiners in the United States don’t even use a point system unlike Italy, who says that they need to see 16 to 17 points of similarity on a fingerprint, or like in Brazil who need a 30 point match to make sure. There are a lot of cases that have innocent people being convicted because of faulty fingerprint identification. The issue of fingerprints being used as evidence alone to convict the person needs to be looked over. The examiners need to be a certified experts and also when testifying in court. They have to be certain of their result and make sure we can rely on it as reliable evidence. People could spent years or even a lifetime because of a mistake examiners make just based on fingerprints that might not even be a close match as they have sworn it is. In my opinion, I believe that you can not depend on fingerprints as evidence alone, it is very easy to make a mistake.
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