Friday, January 20, 2006

Fingerprint Evidence

We've added Commonwealth v. Patterson, a December 2005 SJC case, to Law About Criminal Procedure. The court held that while "the underlying theory and process of latent fingerprint identification, and the ACE-V method in particular, are sufficiently reliable to admit expert opinion testimony regarding the matching of a latent impression with a full fingerprint," the same theory and methodology cannot be "applied reliably to simultaneous impressions not capable of being individually matched to any of the fingers that supposedly made them."