September 9, 2020 • 34 mins
Josh Dubin discusses Fingerprint Evidence with Mary Moriarty, Chief Public Defender of Hennepin County in Minnesota
Contrary to what pop culture has ingrained in the American conscience, matching known fingerprints of a suspect to prints left at the scene of a crime is not an exact science. It’s entirely subjective.
So how did fingerprints become so widely accepted and thought of as the gold standard, as fool proof evidence?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday night. You hop in the shower, then put
on your favorite blue button down shirt. You look at
yourself in the mirror and hype yourself up a bit.
You're forty years old, but you've taken good care of
yourself over the years and still look pretty damn good.
You head out, and when you get to the club,
(00:21):
you see your friend Alvin standing outside on the corner
waiting for you. You smile because Alvin's always a good time.
He might be the only person who can keep up
with you when you dance all night. You both head
inside and grab a drink, catch up a little bit,
and then hit the dance floor. The place is all
bass and flashing lights. Neither one of you stops moving
(00:44):
until they turn off the music and the DJ tells
everyone it's closing time. Time to get out of here.
When you get outside the club, you say goodbye to
Alvin because you have to get up early in the morning.
You're not going to go back to his place tonight.
You give Alvin a call the next weekend, but there's
no answer. You don't think much of it because Alvin
(01:07):
sometimes just doesn't answer his phone. He's the kind of
guy that does his own thing. But then a few
days later, you get a call from another friend. He
tells you he passed by Alvin's house and there were
police officers surrounding it. They said that Alvin had been murdered.
(01:28):
You hang up and immediately head to the police station.
You want to help figure out who did this. You
meet with detectives and you find out that Alvin was
murdered on the night you went dancing with him, but
he wasn't discovered until nine days later. His landlord found
him on the floor of his apartment, and you hear
(01:49):
all this, and you're just immediately nauseous. If you had
stayed at his house that night, maybe you could have
protected him. You tell the police everything you can remember
that night. You want to do anything you can to
help them find out who did this to your friend.
(02:09):
The police call you in four times over the next
two weeks as they investigate Alvin's murder. One day, they
tell you they're taking fingerprints of everyone who had been
around Alvin in the days preceding his death. They tell
you that by allowing them to take your prints, it'll
help them figure out who committed the murder. Part of
you feels like you're in an episode of some detective
(02:31):
show when they press the tips of your fingers and
the palms of your hands on a cold inkpad, then
roll the tips of your fingers one by one on
a piece of paper. You've seen this process what seems
like hundreds of times before on TV and in the movies,
but you've never actually done it yourself. You have no record.
You've never been fingerprinted before. Not long after that, the
(02:55):
police call you into the station one more time, but
something has shifted. They bring you into an interrogation room.
The first thing they do is show you a polaroid
of Alvin's body. You immediately feel fluid bubble into your
esophagus and you quickly scan the room for a garbage can.
(03:18):
Your mind quickly computes shit if IPU in front of
these cops, they'll think I did this. You manage to
swallow the vomit and there's a sharp burn in your throat.
Then they show you another picture and Alvin is flat
on his back. There's blood everywhere, on his clothes, the
(03:38):
carpet next to him. You can't even see his face.
Whoever did this? Put Alvin's big white box fan over
his head and shoulders, so you can't see the top
portion of his body. You used to make fun of
Alvin for that fan. You were always telling him just
to invest in a damn ac unit. Already the whole
thing seems so surreal. And now the office are pointing
(04:01):
at the fan in the picture and they say, you
see those bloody smudges on the fan, Those are fingerprints
and the prince we took from you the other day.
We've collected over a dozen fingerprints of people who were
in Alvin's apartment before he was murdered, and only yours
matched the prints on that fan. There were no signs
(04:21):
of break in at his apartment, but you didn't have
to break in, did you. Alvin let you in after
your night out together. Then you got in an argument
with him. You got jealous that he was dancing with
other men, and you stabbed him to death, didn't you.
You stare at the officer and disbelieve no. You say,
what are you talking about? Why would I come here
(04:43):
willingly to help you guys out if I had anything
to do with this. They don't listen to a word
you say. They put handcuffs on you and put you
in custody at your trial. Prosecution calls a fingerprint expert
to the stan. He says, before we're even born as
(05:06):
fetuses in the womb, human beings develop ridges on their
fingers and hands. In addition to those ridges, we have
glands that secrete oils, so that when we touch objects,
the whorls, loops, and swirl pattern of those ridges are
left behind. Fingerprint analysis has been around for over one
hundred years, and we know that each of our fingerprints
(05:30):
are unique. The fingerprints were covered from this crime scene
were visible to the naked eye because they were left
as impressions in the victim's blood. I analyze these prints
and compare them to defining characteristics of the defendants prints.
The bloody prints found near the victim's body clearly belonged
(05:51):
to the defendant. I am one hundred percent certain about this.
The prosecution calls two more fingerprint experts to the stand,
and they all agree these are your prints. But your
attorney calls two witnesses to the stand, fingerprint experts that
claim it isn't even close. There's no way these prints
(06:12):
belong to you. The jury isn't phased by the conflicting
opinions of the expert witnesses. They are convinced by the
impassioned story that the prosecutor laid out. They convict you
of first degree murder and abuse of a corpse. Your
sentenced to life without parole. There is shouting in the
(06:33):
courtroom as you're escorted out by cops with your hands
cuffed tightly behind your back. You can't understand why this
is happening. What is going on? Those are not your fingerprints.
You feel totally and completely helpless, But lucky for you,
this isn't the end. The fingerprint experts that testified in
(06:56):
your defense call this conviction a gross miscarriage of justice.
They demand that the evidence be reevaluated. A panel of
experts do just that and find that the prosecution's evaluation
was clearly wrong. The prints at the crime scene clearly
do not match your fingerprints. One of the experts for
(07:17):
the prosecution admits he made a mistake. You're afforded a
new trial and you are found not guilty. But this
process takes two agonizing years, and after serving that amount
of time in prison for a crime you never committed,
the murder of your friend, you're released. The story you
(07:41):
just heard is based on the true story of Richard Jackson,
who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life without parole
for the murder of his friend Alvin Davis in nineteen
ninety eight. While fingerprint analysis has been proven to be
purely subjective, it still holds a firm place in the
public imagination and therefore enjures minds as reliable science. I'm
(08:07):
Josh Dubin civil rights and criminal defense attorney, an innocent
ambassador to the Innocence Project in New York. Today, on
Wrongful Conviction Junk Science, we examined fingerprint evidence. Contrary to
what pop culture has ingrained in the American conscience. Matching
known prints of a suspect the prince left at the
(08:28):
scene of a crime is not an exact science. It
is entirely subjective, up to the eye of the examiner.
So how did fingerprints become so widely accepted and thought
of as the gold standard as full proof evidence. It
turns out that the first time fingerprints were admitted into
evidence was almost one hundred and ten years ago, and
(08:52):
the methods used to match prints to individuals hasn't changed
much since.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode
and of the Last Mile organization, which provides business and
tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re
enter the workforce. The Pacers Foundation is committed to improving
the lives of Hoosiers across Indiana, supporting organizations dedicated primarily
(09:22):
to helping young people and students. For more information on
the work of the Pacers Foundation or the Last Mile Program,
visit Pacersfoundation dot org or the Lastmile dot org.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
As Clarence Hiller painted the railing outside his home in
the early evening of September eighteenth, nineteen ten, he couldn't
stop looking over his shoulder. It seemed like the entire
South Side of Chicago was on edge. There had been
a number of robberies in the area, and everyone was
worried that they could be the next victim, And so
(09:59):
in the the middle of that night, when Clarence heard
the screams of his wife and daughter, he was prepared
to launch into action. He confronted the stranger in his house,
and as Clarence tried to force the man out, both
the robber and Clarence fell down the stairs. Three shots
were fired, the intruder fled, and his neighbors came outside
and their slippers and robes to see what had happened.
(10:22):
They found Clarence bleeding just outside his front door with
his daughter standing over him. The police were called and
a suspect, Thomas Jennings, was found just eight blocks away.
His coat was torn and bloody, and he was carrying
a revolver. Thomas Jennings was ultimately convicted, but this wasn't
the only evidence used in his prosecution. When Thomas Jennings
(10:45):
climbed into the Hiller's home that night, he grabbed onto
the railing that Clarence was painting the night before, leaving
a fingerprint behind in a semi wet coat of paint.
The prosecution cut off the piece of the rail with
the fingerprint that Jennings left behind. At his murder trial,
jennings defense attorney argued that this new forensic method of
(11:05):
lifting and comparing fingerprints couldn't be trusted. There were no
tests that could prove that it was reliable. But then
the prosecutor got in front of the jury and pressed
his finger onto a piece of paper. He then demonstrated
how he was able to lift his own print off
of it. By proving that he could collect the evidence
he was able to convince the jury that it was
(11:26):
also possible to accurately analyze and match it to a suspect.
The judge ruled that fingerprint testimony was admissible and Jennings
was convicted. The precedent of admitting fingerprints has been upheld
again and again, despite the fact that numerous men and
women have been falsely identified through fingerprint evidence. For example,
(11:48):
on March eleventh, two thousand and four, there were a
series of explosions in Madrid during rush hour. Ten bombs
went off, all within two minutes of each other. One
hundred and ninety three people died in almost two thousand
were injured. Upon investigation, Spanish authorities found a fingerprint on
one of the plastic bags that contained a detonator. They
(12:09):
photographed it, then reached out to countries around the world
to help find the culprits of the attack. The US
authorities ran the print through a database of fingerprints. Twenty
possible matches appeared. One of them was Brandon Mayfield, but
Brandon Mayfield hadn't left the country in ten years. He
didn't even have a valid passport. FBI analysts had no
(12:30):
idea how Mayfield would have been able to fly to
Spain and back completely undetected, and yet they pursued him
as a suspect. It turns out that Brandon had converted
to Islam after marrying his Egyptian wife, and so American
authorities must have seen him as a convenient suspect just
a few years after nine to eleven. In fact, despite
(12:51):
evidence that showed that it was extremely unlikely that Brandon
had left the Prince on that back, three different FBI
agents testified that the prince found in Spain matched Mayfields.
They said that it matched with one hundred percent certainty.
They arrested Mayfield, and while he sat in jail, the
FBI tried to convince the Spanish authorities that these prints
(13:12):
were Mayfields, but the Spanish police didn't see what the
FBI saw. The prince didn't seem to match it all,
from their perspective, a far cry from a match with
one hundred percent certainty. They said that when they compared
Mayfield's prince to the ones on the bag, it was
quote conclusively negative. They eventually did find a match for
(13:33):
the fingerprints and apprehended the man who left them behind
during the attack. The FBI admitted that they made a
mistake in pursuing Mayfield and let him walk free. Mayfield
is now probably the best known case of mistaken fingerprints,
but he certainly isn't the only one.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
And we probably can guess if the Spanish police hadn't
been involved, or if they didn't have DNA, imagine this
case in the United States. Mister Mayfield would have been convicted.
How would his defense lawyer have attacked three FBI agents
with all of this experience, who claimed with one hundred
percent certainty that this print belonged to mister Mayfield. But
(14:16):
here's the point here. You could assume that three fingerprint
examiners with decades of experience who were certified, followed the
process and they were all wrong.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Joining us today is Mary Moriarty, the chief public Defender
of Hennepin County in Minnesota, and I'm really excited to
have her as a guest. She is a staunch defender
of the rights of the accused, an outspoken one of that,
and we need more public defenders like that in our country.
She has worked to challenge the admission of fingerprints. So, Mary,
(14:53):
tell us a little bit about how you first became
interested in fingerprints.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
So it goes back to when I as a child. Actually,
if you notice, my last name is Moriarty, and I
had a particular interest in Sherlock Holmes, and I got
for Christmas one year the Hardy Boys book that talked
about how to collect evidence, and one of the things
I had in there was a recipe for fingerprint powder,
(15:21):
and so I would go take my parents' glasses, wineglasses,
that kind of thing, and I would dust them for prints.
I would put tape over it and I would lift
the print. But I never really thought, well, what do
you do after that? It was just an interesting exercise
in taking items that I knew my parents had touched
and actually trying to lift the prints from them.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Well, I think I was like screwing around with a
Rubik's cube and playing with Gi Joe figures. So this
makes me feel a little bit insecure about what I
was doing as a kid. But it certainly sounds like
you were headed towards a career involving forensics in the law.
For a while.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
My father was actually a public defender, and some of
my dad's clients were actually my classmates, and I got
to know them as individuals. There's an attempt to otherwise
people who become public defender clients. And you know, the
age old question that public defenders get asked is how
can you represent those people? And it's very easy because
(16:23):
those people are our brothers, our dads, our sisters, our cousins.
And you look at what those clients have been through,
and so many of them have a history of trauma,
you can understand why they find themselves in these particular situations.
And I think growing up my parents fostered a really
(16:43):
strong sense of justice in my life. In every situation,
they would sit me down and say, you know, what
is the right thing to do here? So fast forward
when I went to law school. Once I finally made
that decision, I knew that there was only one thing
that I wanted to be and that was a public defender.
I wanted to be in a courtroom representing the same
(17:05):
people that I got to know through my father's practice.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
All Right, so you became an attorney and got a
chance to right some of the wrongs that you saw
the system. But what were your thoughts about fingerprints when
you first started out?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I have to acknowledge. So I've been a public defender
for thirty years and I certainly had fingerprint cases, and
I also accepted without questioning that they were based on
science and that an expert could actually testify that a
single finger made this print from the crime scene. And
(17:50):
fingerprints have been accepted as evidence in courts for over
one hundred years, and people assume that it's reliable.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So this is something that always fascinated me. I don't
even know when it was that I began to believe this,
but even I had come to the belief that fingerprints
were sort of the gold standard, and that seems to
be sort of a consistent, you know, collective thought in
the American psyche that fingerprints are regarded as being just
really reliable. Why do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (18:22):
They're in popular culture. We've all grown up being given
a certain perspective on what fingerprints are. When I started
getting an interest in fingerprints, I would say to people
outside the legal system, my friends, I would say, you know,
when you think about how a fingerprint from a crime
scene is compared to the known print of somebody, what
(18:43):
does that look like in your mind? And they will
always say, well, I envision the crime scene print on
a screen right next to the known fingerprint, and then
I see a computer merging them and bells going off, going.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Ding ding ding.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
It matches, and that makes sense. It makes sense that
people would think that. When I tell people that that's
not at all what happens, they are shocked. Lay people
hear that there are these databases and they tend to
think that everybody's fingerprints are in it. And so I
think what people believe is that, Okay, you get a
(19:19):
fingerprint off a gun and you put it in a
database and the computer comes up with the match and
that's it. So that's not true at all. So of
course we're all entrenched in popular culture. We've been told
for many, many years fingerprints are fantastic, and you know,
why would anybody take the time to actually look to
(19:41):
see what they do?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
So tell us a little bit about what they actually do.
Practically speaking, how does it actually work? What if fingerprint
examiners look at.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
The way fingerprint examiners actually look at fingerprints is through
what they call a methodology called ACE. So it's a
C E slash V, which is analysis, comparison, evaluation and verification.
So here's a description of what they actually do. Let's
(20:13):
say a person is shot with a gun. They will lift,
and by lift, I mean they'll look for a fingerprint
on that gun and then they will try to remove
that fingerprint so that they can compare it. So the
a part is analysis. They are supposed to look at
(20:34):
that fingerprint to see whether there is enough detail in
it to go any further. People have seen these pictures
of somebody rolling their finger over a pad of ink,
and that's how you get the print. That's not what happens.
When people touch objects. You get a fragment, and sometimes
(20:54):
it's smeared, and sometimes there's dust on it, sometimes there's oil.
There are a lot of different facts. And so here's
the deal. It's not that you're comparing a fully rolled
fingerprint to a fully rolled fingerprint. You are first looking
at a fragment of the print, and it is totally
within the subjectivity, the subjective discretion of a fingerprint analysis
(21:17):
or examiner to decide whether there is enough information on
that print to even go ahead and compare it. So
just think about.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
That, right, That's kind of scary because it's up to
the judgment call of one analyst on that particular day,
and I'm quite sure that another analyst looking at the
same portion of a print might come up with the
opposite conclusion. So it turns out that the A in ACV,
(21:47):
the very first step is problematic and pretty flawed. So
the next letter is the C for comparison. Where you're
taking a print left at a crime scene and comparing
it to a suspects print. Tell us a little bit
about what that process entails.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Mary, So once you make the decision to go forward,
then you are onto the sea or comparison, and you're
comparing the fully rolled print to the fragment of a print.
So Josh, you might look and compare those two fingerprints
and say, you know, I see enough here. I see
(22:23):
twelve points of comparison. That's enough for me to say
that this is the same person. I might look at
it and say, oh, I see five points of comparison.
I think that's enough to declare that it's a match.
So once again, it is completely subjective.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Right and saying, well, sometimes we think ten points that
look the same between a rolled print and a fragment
of a print are enough similarities to declare a match,
and sometimes we think five is enough. And that just
doesn't seem scientific and seemed very reliable, and so Mary,
something we've been addressing a lot on this podcast is
(23:06):
the two thousand and nine NAS Report. Tell us a
little bit about what the NAS report said about fingerprints.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
The National Academy of Science is the most prestigious scientific
body in the United States and they advise Congress on
issues of science, medicine, pretty much anything you can think
of when it comes to sciences, and the National Academy
of Science was asked to examine the comparative forensic sciences.
(23:39):
It was a groundbreaking report and it was very in depth.
They took testimony, they solicited research, and it rocked the
forensic science community. One of the things that you realize
when you look at the report, if you are a scientist,
you know that there are certain tenets of science, like
you have to be able to replicate the process. When
(24:01):
a scientist does an experiment, they document what they do.
And the National Academy of Science was very clear that
fingerprint examiners, as well as any other comparative forensic examiners,
do not provide documentation. And I found this to be true.
You would order, you would ask for a fingerprint examiner's file,
(24:22):
and you wouldn't really see many notes. You wouldn't know
what they were actually looking at. You might have a
picture of a fingerprint with some circles on it, but
you wouldn't know what they were looking at. So there
was no way to replicate the process that they actually used.
There was no basis for saying that it came from
the same source. And most of the people who did fingerprints,
(24:45):
and probably still do in some places, are not scientists.
They are not recruited because of their scientific background. They
are often police officers who were apprenticed into this position
because the police officer who examined the print was going
to retire. And then there's the evaluation where you're actually
making the decision about whether this comes from the same source,
(25:08):
and there's a lot of controversy there. Fingerprint examiners used
to come in and say that they had one hundred
percent certainty, they were one hundred percent certain that this
print from the crime scene came from this particular client,
and there was no basis for that. In fact, that's
not even allowed anymore. And why is there no basis
(25:29):
for it? You would have to have population statistics, right,
I mean, that's what DNA has, That's why they come
up with these numbers. It's one in a million that
it came from this person. There are no population statistics
regarding fingerprints.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Okay, so we're seeing that there are a lot of
flaws with both analyzing and comparing prints, the A and
the C and as that neither of these steps are
actually rooted in the scientific methods. And now we're onto E, right, ACE.
So the E is evaluation where they decide if it's
a match or not. And so it seems that if
(26:16):
analyzing and comparing the prints aren't scientifically proven to work,
the evaluation of those prints and deciding whether or not
it's a match can't be done to any degree of
certainty either. That just seems like common sense. So this
is purely subjective. But there's one last letter in these
steps that examiners follow, and that's the V for verification. Right,
(26:39):
it's ace V. And I'm already skeptical because the first
three steps of the process are flawed, So how could
the results be verified?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Imagine this, A fingerprint examiner would decide that this fragment
of a print came from this particular person, and then
they would hand it off to another fingerprint examiner for verification.
But the issue was it was never blind. So, Josh,
let's say you and I were fingerprint examiners in the
same office, and I would make a decision about a print,
(27:11):
and then I would ask you to verify what I
had done. And the problem with that is you already
knew what I had done. It wasn't blind. In science,
they do blind verification, so that the person who's actually
attempting to verify or replicate what the first person did
it doesn't know what the result was actually, So the
(27:33):
fact that the verification wasn't blind led to what people
call confirmation bias, which is a huge problem.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
All right. So, once the NAS basically said that the
ACEV process is really a recipe for wrongful convictions, this
should have been an explosion in the criminal justice system
in the courts, and it just wasn't. And that's I guess,
a different issue altogether. We have to keep pushing in
that regard. But you are still trying to push and
(28:03):
challenge the admissibility of fingerprints in the criminal justice system,
and I have to tell you, it just seems like
it must be so difficult, Mary, because this is not
like any kind of scientific analysis. But it just feels
to me that everyone believes fingerprint evidence works. It's so
(28:24):
ingrained in pop culture, and just like the intrinsic belief
that people have that we've grown up with. So tell me,
what are some of the problems you've run into when
trying to call and question this so called science.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
When you're in court litigating this. You're absolutely right, that
is one of the things you hear from prosecutors and
you hear from judges. Of course, this is reliable. It's
been coming into court for decades and decades, and nobody
has ever challenged it before. So that is a big
hurdle to get over, much more so than other things
like bite marks, blood spatter and that sort of thing.
(29:03):
The court system always lags behind science, and it was
an uphill climb to convince judges and prosecutors that there
were problems with fingerprints, or if you could convince them
that there were problems, you certainly couldn't convince them that
they should exclude that evidence. In fact, judges and I
(29:23):
heard this quite a bit. It's like, well, you know,
let's just let the jury decide. But then you get
back to the problem of jurors thinking that fingerprints are
you know, they've been with us forever. They're embedded in
popular culture, and you have to get over all of
that history to convince durors that there are indeed issues. Essentially,
the presumption is that prints are infallible. In a case
(29:48):
where your client is supposed to be presumed innocent and
the prosecution or the government has to prove their case
beyond a reasonable doubt, a significant piece of evidence is
presumed to be infallible. You have a lot of work
to do to try to educate them that that's not
the case.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Right, because it turns out that judges are really no
different than jurors. I mean, in some instances they're more sophisticated,
not always. They certainly have less time and frankly sometimes
less patience, but they're sort of not immune to the
impact of pop culture and precedent. But look, some people
(30:25):
may be listening to this and thinking, I don't have
a law degree, but I want to help. I want
to do something about this. So do you have any
ideas for what our listeners can do to help I do?
Speaker 3 (30:37):
And I wanted to go back, just for a moment
to talk about precedent because where I went in my
mind are courts saying that actual innocence of a client
on death row doesn't matter because procedure was followed. So
that should alert your listeners how much courts adhere to
(30:59):
press and are deferential to previous findings to the point
where they would authorize that somebody received the death penalty
because the process was followed. Anyone in the public wants
the law enforcement, the system to get things right. And
the only way we can get things right is if
(31:20):
we understand the limitations of these forensic sciences, so people
can be writing letters, calling their prosecutors, their policymakers, county commissioners,
city council members. What are you doing to make sure
that police officers, that crime lab examiners understand this information?
(31:41):
And that would be really helpful because people really do
listen more to constituents and people in the public than
they do potentially defense lawyers.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
You know, I've said this before, and I really do
think it bears repeating. Pressure breaks pipes. What you all
can do as listeners of this podcast is take action.
You're on here because you want to learn something, but
you also want to do something about it. The way
that we stop this junk signs from making it into
(32:15):
our courts is to shine a bright light on it.
Google the NAS Report that we've continually talked about during
this season. That report details how so many of these
disciplines of forensic science, including fingerprints, are really problematic. The
problem is judges don't know about it. Find out who
(32:36):
your local criminal court judges are and send them the
NAS Report. Highlight this section on fingerprint analysis and send
to your local criminal court judges. It's only by educating
our judges and speaking truth to power that we can
really make change happen. And if you don't think that
your voice matters, just take a look around the country
(32:58):
right now. It's the collection the voice that is causing
change to happen, and we can do it one step
at a time in our criminal justice system. Thank you
for listening to Wrongful Conviction Junk Science. We're going to
(33:18):
be taking a little break, but our next episode will
be out on October seventh. In the meantime, we will
be keeping a critical and close eye on our criminal
justice system. We would love to hear how you're doing
that along with us, so please leave us a comment
and let us know what you've been up to, and
stay on the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed as Jason Flamm
(33:40):
will continue to release episodes between now and October seventh.
Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. Thanks
to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at
Signal Company Number One, ducer Kevin Wardis and senior producers
(34:02):
Kara Kornhaber and Britz Spangler. Our music was composed by
Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at dubin Josh.
Follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
It's Friday night. You hop in the shower, then put
on your favorite blue button down shirt. You look at
yourself in the mirror and hype yourself up a bit.
You're forty years old, but you've taken good care of
yourself over the years and still look pretty damn good.
You head out, and when you get to the club,
(00:21):
you see your friend Alvin standing outside on the corner
waiting for you. You smile because Alvin's always a good time.
He might be the only person who can keep up
with you when you dance all night. You both head
inside and grab a drink, catch up a little bit,
and then hit the dance floor. The place is all
bass and flashing lights. Neither one of you stops moving
(00:44):
until they turn off the music and the DJ tells
everyone it's closing time. Time to get out of here.
When you get outside the club, you say goodbye to
Alvin because you have to get up early in the morning.
You're not going to go back to his place tonight.
You give Alvin a call the next weekend, but there's
no answer. You don't think much of it because Alvin
(01:07):
sometimes just doesn't answer his phone. He's the kind of
guy that does his own thing. But then a few
days later, you get a call from another friend. He
tells you he passed by Alvin's house and there were
police officers surrounding it. They said that Alvin had been murdered.
(01:28):
You hang up and immediately head to the police station.
You want to help figure out who did this. You
meet with detectives and you find out that Alvin was
murdered on the night you went dancing with him, but
he wasn't discovered until nine days later. His landlord found
him on the floor of his apartment, and you hear
(01:49):
all this, and you're just immediately nauseous. If you had
stayed at his house that night, maybe you could have
protected him. You tell the police everything you can remember
that night. You want to do anything you can to
help them find out who did this to your friend.
(02:09):
The police call you in four times over the next
two weeks as they investigate Alvin's murder. One day, they
tell you they're taking fingerprints of everyone who had been
around Alvin in the days preceding his death. They tell
you that by allowing them to take your prints, it'll
help them figure out who committed the murder. Part of
you feels like you're in an episode of some detective
(02:31):
show when they press the tips of your fingers and
the palms of your hands on a cold inkpad, then
roll the tips of your fingers one by one on
a piece of paper. You've seen this process what seems
like hundreds of times before on TV and in the movies,
but you've never actually done it yourself. You have no record.
You've never been fingerprinted before. Not long after that, the
(02:55):
police call you into the station one more time, but
something has shifted. They bring you into an interrogation room.
The first thing they do is show you a polaroid
of Alvin's body. You immediately feel fluid bubble into your
esophagus and you quickly scan the room for a garbage can.
(03:18):
Your mind quickly computes shit if IPU in front of
these cops, they'll think I did this. You manage to
swallow the vomit and there's a sharp burn in your throat.
Then they show you another picture and Alvin is flat
on his back. There's blood everywhere, on his clothes, the
(03:38):
carpet next to him. You can't even see his face.
Whoever did this? Put Alvin's big white box fan over
his head and shoulders, so you can't see the top
portion of his body. You used to make fun of
Alvin for that fan. You were always telling him just
to invest in a damn ac unit. Already the whole
thing seems so surreal. And now the office are pointing
(04:01):
at the fan in the picture and they say, you
see those bloody smudges on the fan, Those are fingerprints
and the prince we took from you the other day.
We've collected over a dozen fingerprints of people who were
in Alvin's apartment before he was murdered, and only yours
matched the prints on that fan. There were no signs
(04:21):
of break in at his apartment, but you didn't have
to break in, did you. Alvin let you in after
your night out together. Then you got in an argument
with him. You got jealous that he was dancing with
other men, and you stabbed him to death, didn't you.
You stare at the officer and disbelieve no. You say,
what are you talking about? Why would I come here
(04:43):
willingly to help you guys out if I had anything
to do with this. They don't listen to a word
you say. They put handcuffs on you and put you
in custody at your trial. Prosecution calls a fingerprint expert
to the stan. He says, before we're even born as
(05:06):
fetuses in the womb, human beings develop ridges on their
fingers and hands. In addition to those ridges, we have
glands that secrete oils, so that when we touch objects,
the whorls, loops, and swirl pattern of those ridges are
left behind. Fingerprint analysis has been around for over one
hundred years, and we know that each of our fingerprints
(05:30):
are unique. The fingerprints were covered from this crime scene
were visible to the naked eye because they were left
as impressions in the victim's blood. I analyze these prints
and compare them to defining characteristics of the defendants prints.
The bloody prints found near the victim's body clearly belonged
(05:51):
to the defendant. I am one hundred percent certain about this.
The prosecution calls two more fingerprint experts to the stand,
and they all agree these are your prints. But your
attorney calls two witnesses to the stand, fingerprint experts that
claim it isn't even close. There's no way these prints
(06:12):
belong to you. The jury isn't phased by the conflicting
opinions of the expert witnesses. They are convinced by the
impassioned story that the prosecutor laid out. They convict you
of first degree murder and abuse of a corpse. Your
sentenced to life without parole. There is shouting in the
(06:33):
courtroom as you're escorted out by cops with your hands
cuffed tightly behind your back. You can't understand why this
is happening. What is going on? Those are not your fingerprints.
You feel totally and completely helpless, But lucky for you,
this isn't the end. The fingerprint experts that testified in
(06:56):
your defense call this conviction a gross miscarriage of justice.
They demand that the evidence be reevaluated. A panel of
experts do just that and find that the prosecution's evaluation
was clearly wrong. The prints at the crime scene clearly
do not match your fingerprints. One of the experts for
(07:17):
the prosecution admits he made a mistake. You're afforded a
new trial and you are found not guilty. But this
process takes two agonizing years, and after serving that amount
of time in prison for a crime you never committed,
the murder of your friend, you're released. The story you
(07:41):
just heard is based on the true story of Richard Jackson,
who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life without parole
for the murder of his friend Alvin Davis in nineteen
ninety eight. While fingerprint analysis has been proven to be
purely subjective, it still holds a firm place in the
public imagination and therefore enjures minds as reliable science. I'm
(08:07):
Josh Dubin civil rights and criminal defense attorney, an innocent
ambassador to the Innocence Project in New York. Today, on
Wrongful Conviction Junk Science, we examined fingerprint evidence. Contrary to
what pop culture has ingrained in the American conscience. Matching
known prints of a suspect the prince left at the
(08:28):
scene of a crime is not an exact science. It
is entirely subjective, up to the eye of the examiner.
So how did fingerprints become so widely accepted and thought
of as the gold standard as full proof evidence. It
turns out that the first time fingerprints were admitted into
evidence was almost one hundred and ten years ago, and
(08:52):
the methods used to match prints to individuals hasn't changed
much since.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode
and of the Last Mile organization, which provides business and
tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re
enter the workforce. The Pacers Foundation is committed to improving
the lives of Hoosiers across Indiana, supporting organizations dedicated primarily
(09:22):
to helping young people and students. For more information on
the work of the Pacers Foundation or the Last Mile Program,
visit Pacersfoundation dot org or the Lastmile dot org.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
As Clarence Hiller painted the railing outside his home in
the early evening of September eighteenth, nineteen ten, he couldn't
stop looking over his shoulder. It seemed like the entire
South Side of Chicago was on edge. There had been
a number of robberies in the area, and everyone was
worried that they could be the next victim, And so
(09:59):
in the the middle of that night, when Clarence heard
the screams of his wife and daughter, he was prepared
to launch into action. He confronted the stranger in his house,
and as Clarence tried to force the man out, both
the robber and Clarence fell down the stairs. Three shots
were fired, the intruder fled, and his neighbors came outside
and their slippers and robes to see what had happened.
(10:22):
They found Clarence bleeding just outside his front door with
his daughter standing over him. The police were called and
a suspect, Thomas Jennings, was found just eight blocks away.
His coat was torn and bloody, and he was carrying
a revolver. Thomas Jennings was ultimately convicted, but this wasn't
the only evidence used in his prosecution. When Thomas Jennings
(10:45):
climbed into the Hiller's home that night, he grabbed onto
the railing that Clarence was painting the night before, leaving
a fingerprint behind in a semi wet coat of paint.
The prosecution cut off the piece of the rail with
the fingerprint that Jennings left behind. At his murder trial,
jennings defense attorney argued that this new forensic method of
(11:05):
lifting and comparing fingerprints couldn't be trusted. There were no
tests that could prove that it was reliable. But then
the prosecutor got in front of the jury and pressed
his finger onto a piece of paper. He then demonstrated
how he was able to lift his own print off
of it. By proving that he could collect the evidence
he was able to convince the jury that it was
(11:26):
also possible to accurately analyze and match it to a suspect.
The judge ruled that fingerprint testimony was admissible and Jennings
was convicted. The precedent of admitting fingerprints has been upheld
again and again, despite the fact that numerous men and
women have been falsely identified through fingerprint evidence. For example,
(11:48):
on March eleventh, two thousand and four, there were a
series of explosions in Madrid during rush hour. Ten bombs
went off, all within two minutes of each other. One
hundred and ninety three people died in almost two thousand
were injured. Upon investigation, Spanish authorities found a fingerprint on
one of the plastic bags that contained a detonator. They
(12:09):
photographed it, then reached out to countries around the world
to help find the culprits of the attack. The US
authorities ran the print through a database of fingerprints. Twenty
possible matches appeared. One of them was Brandon Mayfield, but
Brandon Mayfield hadn't left the country in ten years. He
didn't even have a valid passport. FBI analysts had no
(12:30):
idea how Mayfield would have been able to fly to
Spain and back completely undetected, and yet they pursued him
as a suspect. It turns out that Brandon had converted
to Islam after marrying his Egyptian wife, and so American
authorities must have seen him as a convenient suspect just
a few years after nine to eleven. In fact, despite
(12:51):
evidence that showed that it was extremely unlikely that Brandon
had left the Prince on that back, three different FBI
agents testified that the prince found in Spain matched Mayfields.
They said that it matched with one hundred percent certainty.
They arrested Mayfield, and while he sat in jail, the
FBI tried to convince the Spanish authorities that these prints
(13:12):
were Mayfields, but the Spanish police didn't see what the
FBI saw. The prince didn't seem to match it all,
from their perspective, a far cry from a match with
one hundred percent certainty. They said that when they compared
Mayfield's prince to the ones on the bag, it was
quote conclusively negative. They eventually did find a match for
(13:33):
the fingerprints and apprehended the man who left them behind
during the attack. The FBI admitted that they made a
mistake in pursuing Mayfield and let him walk free. Mayfield
is now probably the best known case of mistaken fingerprints,
but he certainly isn't the only one.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
And we probably can guess if the Spanish police hadn't
been involved, or if they didn't have DNA, imagine this
case in the United States. Mister Mayfield would have been convicted.
How would his defense lawyer have attacked three FBI agents
with all of this experience, who claimed with one hundred
percent certainty that this print belonged to mister Mayfield. But
(14:16):
here's the point here. You could assume that three fingerprint
examiners with decades of experience who were certified, followed the
process and they were all wrong.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Joining us today is Mary Moriarty, the chief public Defender
of Hennepin County in Minnesota, and I'm really excited to
have her as a guest. She is a staunch defender
of the rights of the accused, an outspoken one of that,
and we need more public defenders like that in our country.
She has worked to challenge the admission of fingerprints. So, Mary,
(14:53):
tell us a little bit about how you first became
interested in fingerprints.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
So it goes back to when I as a child. Actually,
if you notice, my last name is Moriarty, and I
had a particular interest in Sherlock Holmes, and I got
for Christmas one year the Hardy Boys book that talked
about how to collect evidence, and one of the things
I had in there was a recipe for fingerprint powder,
(15:21):
and so I would go take my parents' glasses, wineglasses,
that kind of thing, and I would dust them for prints.
I would put tape over it and I would lift
the print. But I never really thought, well, what do
you do after that? It was just an interesting exercise
in taking items that I knew my parents had touched
and actually trying to lift the prints from them.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Well, I think I was like screwing around with a
Rubik's cube and playing with Gi Joe figures. So this
makes me feel a little bit insecure about what I
was doing as a kid. But it certainly sounds like
you were headed towards a career involving forensics in the law.
For a while.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
My father was actually a public defender, and some of
my dad's clients were actually my classmates, and I got
to know them as individuals. There's an attempt to otherwise
people who become public defender clients. And you know, the
age old question that public defenders get asked is how
can you represent those people? And it's very easy because
(16:23):
those people are our brothers, our dads, our sisters, our cousins.
And you look at what those clients have been through,
and so many of them have a history of trauma,
you can understand why they find themselves in these particular situations.
And I think growing up my parents fostered a really
(16:43):
strong sense of justice in my life. In every situation,
they would sit me down and say, you know, what
is the right thing to do here? So fast forward
when I went to law school. Once I finally made
that decision, I knew that there was only one thing
that I wanted to be and that was a public defender.
I wanted to be in a courtroom representing the same
(17:05):
people that I got to know through my father's practice.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
All Right, so you became an attorney and got a
chance to right some of the wrongs that you saw
the system. But what were your thoughts about fingerprints when
you first started out?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I have to acknowledge. So I've been a public defender
for thirty years and I certainly had fingerprint cases, and
I also accepted without questioning that they were based on
science and that an expert could actually testify that a
single finger made this print from the crime scene. And
(17:50):
fingerprints have been accepted as evidence in courts for over
one hundred years, and people assume that it's reliable.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
So this is something that always fascinated me. I don't
even know when it was that I began to believe this,
but even I had come to the belief that fingerprints
were sort of the gold standard, and that seems to
be sort of a consistent, you know, collective thought in
the American psyche that fingerprints are regarded as being just
really reliable. Why do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (18:22):
They're in popular culture. We've all grown up being given
a certain perspective on what fingerprints are. When I started
getting an interest in fingerprints, I would say to people
outside the legal system, my friends, I would say, you know,
when you think about how a fingerprint from a crime
scene is compared to the known print of somebody, what
(18:43):
does that look like in your mind? And they will
always say, well, I envision the crime scene print on
a screen right next to the known fingerprint, and then
I see a computer merging them and bells going off, going.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Ding ding ding.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
It matches, and that makes sense. It makes sense that
people would think that. When I tell people that that's
not at all what happens, they are shocked. Lay people
hear that there are these databases and they tend to
think that everybody's fingerprints are in it. And so I
think what people believe is that, Okay, you get a
(19:19):
fingerprint off a gun and you put it in a
database and the computer comes up with the match and
that's it. So that's not true at all. So of
course we're all entrenched in popular culture. We've been told
for many, many years fingerprints are fantastic, and you know,
why would anybody take the time to actually look to
(19:41):
see what they do?
Speaker 1 (19:43):
So tell us a little bit about what they actually do.
Practically speaking, how does it actually work? What if fingerprint
examiners look at.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
The way fingerprint examiners actually look at fingerprints is through
what they call a methodology called ACE. So it's a
C E slash V, which is analysis, comparison, evaluation and verification.
So here's a description of what they actually do. Let's
(20:13):
say a person is shot with a gun. They will lift,
and by lift, I mean they'll look for a fingerprint
on that gun and then they will try to remove
that fingerprint so that they can compare it. So the
a part is analysis. They are supposed to look at
(20:34):
that fingerprint to see whether there is enough detail in
it to go any further. People have seen these pictures
of somebody rolling their finger over a pad of ink,
and that's how you get the print. That's not what happens.
When people touch objects. You get a fragment, and sometimes
(20:54):
it's smeared, and sometimes there's dust on it, sometimes there's oil.
There are a lot of different facts. And so here's
the deal. It's not that you're comparing a fully rolled
fingerprint to a fully rolled fingerprint. You are first looking
at a fragment of the print, and it is totally
within the subjectivity, the subjective discretion of a fingerprint analysis
(21:17):
or examiner to decide whether there is enough information on
that print to even go ahead and compare it. So
just think about.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
That, right, That's kind of scary because it's up to
the judgment call of one analyst on that particular day,
and I'm quite sure that another analyst looking at the
same portion of a print might come up with the
opposite conclusion. So it turns out that the A in ACV,
(21:47):
the very first step is problematic and pretty flawed. So
the next letter is the C for comparison. Where you're
taking a print left at a crime scene and comparing
it to a suspects print. Tell us a little bit
about what that process entails.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Mary, So once you make the decision to go forward,
then you are onto the sea or comparison, and you're
comparing the fully rolled print to the fragment of a print.
So Josh, you might look and compare those two fingerprints
and say, you know, I see enough here. I see
(22:23):
twelve points of comparison. That's enough for me to say
that this is the same person. I might look at
it and say, oh, I see five points of comparison.
I think that's enough to declare that it's a match.
So once again, it is completely subjective.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Right and saying, well, sometimes we think ten points that
look the same between a rolled print and a fragment
of a print are enough similarities to declare a match,
and sometimes we think five is enough. And that just
doesn't seem scientific and seemed very reliable, and so Mary,
something we've been addressing a lot on this podcast is
(23:06):
the two thousand and nine NAS Report. Tell us a
little bit about what the NAS report said about fingerprints.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
The National Academy of Science is the most prestigious scientific
body in the United States and they advise Congress on
issues of science, medicine, pretty much anything you can think
of when it comes to sciences, and the National Academy
of Science was asked to examine the comparative forensic sciences.
(23:39):
It was a groundbreaking report and it was very in depth.
They took testimony, they solicited research, and it rocked the
forensic science community. One of the things that you realize
when you look at the report, if you are a scientist,
you know that there are certain tenets of science, like
you have to be able to replicate the process. When
(24:01):
a scientist does an experiment, they document what they do.
And the National Academy of Science was very clear that
fingerprint examiners, as well as any other comparative forensic examiners,
do not provide documentation. And I found this to be true.
You would order, you would ask for a fingerprint examiner's file,
(24:22):
and you wouldn't really see many notes. You wouldn't know
what they were actually looking at. You might have a
picture of a fingerprint with some circles on it, but
you wouldn't know what they were looking at. So there
was no way to replicate the process that they actually used.
There was no basis for saying that it came from
the same source. And most of the people who did fingerprints,
(24:45):
and probably still do in some places, are not scientists.
They are not recruited because of their scientific background. They
are often police officers who were apprenticed into this position
because the police officer who examined the print was going
to retire. And then there's the evaluation where you're actually
making the decision about whether this comes from the same source,
(25:08):
and there's a lot of controversy there. Fingerprint examiners used
to come in and say that they had one hundred
percent certainty, they were one hundred percent certain that this
print from the crime scene came from this particular client,
and there was no basis for that. In fact, that's
not even allowed anymore. And why is there no basis
(25:29):
for it? You would have to have population statistics, right,
I mean, that's what DNA has, That's why they come
up with these numbers. It's one in a million that
it came from this person. There are no population statistics
regarding fingerprints.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Okay, so we're seeing that there are a lot of
flaws with both analyzing and comparing prints, the A and
the C and as that neither of these steps are
actually rooted in the scientific methods. And now we're onto E, right, ACE.
So the E is evaluation where they decide if it's
a match or not. And so it seems that if
(26:16):
analyzing and comparing the prints aren't scientifically proven to work,
the evaluation of those prints and deciding whether or not
it's a match can't be done to any degree of
certainty either. That just seems like common sense. So this
is purely subjective. But there's one last letter in these
steps that examiners follow, and that's the V for verification. Right,
(26:39):
it's ace V. And I'm already skeptical because the first
three steps of the process are flawed, So how could
the results be verified?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Imagine this, A fingerprint examiner would decide that this fragment
of a print came from this particular person, and then
they would hand it off to another fingerprint examiner for verification.
But the issue was it was never blind. So, Josh,
let's say you and I were fingerprint examiners in the
same office, and I would make a decision about a print,
(27:11):
and then I would ask you to verify what I
had done. And the problem with that is you already
knew what I had done. It wasn't blind. In science,
they do blind verification, so that the person who's actually
attempting to verify or replicate what the first person did
it doesn't know what the result was actually, So the
(27:33):
fact that the verification wasn't blind led to what people
call confirmation bias, which is a huge problem.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
All right. So, once the NAS basically said that the
ACEV process is really a recipe for wrongful convictions, this
should have been an explosion in the criminal justice system
in the courts, and it just wasn't. And that's I guess,
a different issue altogether. We have to keep pushing in
that regard. But you are still trying to push and
(28:03):
challenge the admissibility of fingerprints in the criminal justice system,
and I have to tell you, it just seems like
it must be so difficult, Mary, because this is not
like any kind of scientific analysis. But it just feels
to me that everyone believes fingerprint evidence works. It's so
(28:24):
ingrained in pop culture, and just like the intrinsic belief
that people have that we've grown up with. So tell me,
what are some of the problems you've run into when
trying to call and question this so called science.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
When you're in court litigating this. You're absolutely right, that
is one of the things you hear from prosecutors and
you hear from judges. Of course, this is reliable. It's
been coming into court for decades and decades, and nobody
has ever challenged it before. So that is a big
hurdle to get over, much more so than other things
like bite marks, blood spatter and that sort of thing.
(29:03):
The court system always lags behind science, and it was
an uphill climb to convince judges and prosecutors that there
were problems with fingerprints, or if you could convince them
that there were problems, you certainly couldn't convince them that
they should exclude that evidence. In fact, judges and I
(29:23):
heard this quite a bit. It's like, well, you know,
let's just let the jury decide. But then you get
back to the problem of jurors thinking that fingerprints are
you know, they've been with us forever. They're embedded in
popular culture, and you have to get over all of
that history to convince durors that there are indeed issues. Essentially,
the presumption is that prints are infallible. In a case
(29:48):
where your client is supposed to be presumed innocent and
the prosecution or the government has to prove their case
beyond a reasonable doubt, a significant piece of evidence is
presumed to be infallible. You have a lot of work
to do to try to educate them that that's not
the case.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Right, because it turns out that judges are really no
different than jurors. I mean, in some instances they're more sophisticated,
not always. They certainly have less time and frankly sometimes
less patience, but they're sort of not immune to the
impact of pop culture and precedent. But look, some people
(30:25):
may be listening to this and thinking, I don't have
a law degree, but I want to help. I want
to do something about this. So do you have any
ideas for what our listeners can do to help I do?
Speaker 3 (30:37):
And I wanted to go back, just for a moment
to talk about precedent because where I went in my
mind are courts saying that actual innocence of a client
on death row doesn't matter because procedure was followed. So
that should alert your listeners how much courts adhere to
(30:59):
press and are deferential to previous findings to the point
where they would authorize that somebody received the death penalty
because the process was followed. Anyone in the public wants
the law enforcement, the system to get things right. And
the only way we can get things right is if
(31:20):
we understand the limitations of these forensic sciences, so people
can be writing letters, calling their prosecutors, their policymakers, county commissioners,
city council members. What are you doing to make sure
that police officers, that crime lab examiners understand this information?
(31:41):
And that would be really helpful because people really do
listen more to constituents and people in the public than
they do potentially defense lawyers.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
You know, I've said this before, and I really do
think it bears repeating. Pressure breaks pipes. What you all
can do as listeners of this podcast is take action.
You're on here because you want to learn something, but
you also want to do something about it. The way
that we stop this junk signs from making it into
(32:15):
our courts is to shine a bright light on it.
Google the NAS Report that we've continually talked about during
this season. That report details how so many of these
disciplines of forensic science, including fingerprints, are really problematic. The
problem is judges don't know about it. Find out who
(32:36):
your local criminal court judges are and send them the
NAS Report. Highlight this section on fingerprint analysis and send
to your local criminal court judges. It's only by educating
our judges and speaking truth to power that we can
really make change happen. And if you don't think that
your voice matters, just take a look around the country
(32:58):
right now. It's the collection the voice that is causing
change to happen, and we can do it one step
at a time in our criminal justice system. Thank you
for listening to Wrongful Conviction Junk Science. We're going to
(33:18):
be taking a little break, but our next episode will
be out on October seventh. In the meantime, we will
be keeping a critical and close eye on our criminal
justice system. We would love to hear how you're doing
that along with us, so please leave us a comment
and let us know what you've been up to, and
stay on the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed as Jason Flamm
(33:40):
will continue to release episodes between now and October seventh.
Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. Thanks
to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at
Signal Company Number One, ducer Kevin Wardis and senior producers
(34:02):
Kara Kornhaber and Britz Spangler. Our music was composed by
Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at dubin Josh.
Follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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