************************************************************************
Jail unlocked for alleged serial killer
FBI analysis misses fingerprint match in `worst-case scenario'
By Steve Mills and Flynn McRoberts, Tribune staff reporters. The
Associated Press contributed to this report
Published May 5, 2005
An FBI computer failure allowed a sex-crime fugitive to go free in
Georgia last year, a mistake that authorities now say came with a
human toll: The man allegedly committed two murders following his
release.
The FBI acknowledged the computer error this week and, in an effort
to prevent another such failure, has begun rechecking fingerprints
from hundreds of fugitives wanted for the most serious crimes.
"This is obviously a worst-case scenario for us," said Paul Bresson,
an FBI spokesman, contending that the bureau's computer comparisons
are 95 percent accurate. "We're able to identify thousands of
fugitives every month . . . [but] there are going to be instances
where the computer doesn't catch it. And in this case it was the
most tragic of all consequences."
The disclosure was the second recent embarrassment for the FBI's
vaunted fingerprint identification system. A year ago, FBI examiners
falsely implicated an Oregon lawyer in the Madrid train bombings.
Unlike the case of attorney Brandon Mayfield, in which human error
caused an innocent man to be arrested, the latest mistake involved
the FBI's massive fingerprint database and allowed a suspected
criminal to walk free--and, allegedly, commit murder.
Jeremy Bryan Jones, 32, released on a trespassing charge in January
2004, also has been charged with a third killing, in Louisiana, and
has been named as a suspect in at least five other slayings in three
states.
Jones was using an alias when he was arrested on the trespassing
charge in Georgia. Local police sent his fingerprints to the FBI,
but the bureau's computer failed to match them with Jones, who had
been wanted since 2000 in Oklahoma on a sexual assault charge, the
FBI said.
The bureau said it did not realize Jones had been in the database
until September, when he was charged with raping and murdering Lisa
Nichols of Turnerville, Ala.. Jones is being held in Alabama, where
a grand jury indicted him Monday on a count of capital murder.
Jones has been named a suspect, but has not been charged, in at
least two other killings in Georgia, two in Oklahoma and one in
Missouri.
Law-enforcement and other agencies across the country submit roughly
50,000 fingerprint-comparison requests a day to the FBI's Integrated
Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which contains 45
million sets of prints.
Given the size of the system, some experts said errors are bound to
occur. "Understanding the system, you're looking for the needle in
the haystack," said Alan McRoberts, editor of the Journal of
Forensic Identification, "and occasionally you're going to miss."
Others were less forgiving.
"This tragic error, like the misidentification in the Mayfield case,
further calls into question . . . the reliability of fingerprint
analysis generally," said Robert Epstein, who as an assistant
federal defender in Philadelphia was one of the first to challenge
the century-old discipline of fingerprint comparison.
Like more than 80 percent of the fingerprints submitted to the FBI's
database facility in Clarksburg, W.Va., Jones' fingerprints were
sent to the FBI as digital images.
Imaging experts have warned that the relatively poor quality of many
digital images can lead to errors.
"This shows that false negatives are just as bad as false
positives," said Michael Cherry, a biometric expert, adding that
digital images of fingerprints "don't have enough detail, and we're
going to make mistakes."
Asked if there was not enough detail in the digital image submitted
by Georgia authorities for the computer to recognize Jones'
fingerprints, FBI officials said they would not know until the
bureau completes an internal review of the case.
Defenders of the computer system noted that it is a big improvement
over how the FBI compared fingerprints until the last decade. Before
the ID system went online, police submitted inked print cards by
mail and waited days or weeks to get a response from technicians who
compared them by hand.
"If there were no [Fingerprint Identification System] at all, the
guy might still be out there," said Ronald Singer, former president
of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
*****************************************************************************
http://www3.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/national/05suspect.html?
THE NEW YORK TIMES
F.B.I. Apologizes for Failing to Identify Murder Suspect
By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: May 5, 2005
ATLANTA, May 4 - The F.B.I. defended itself on Wednesday after
admitting that it had missed a fingerprint match for a man who the
authorities say went on to kill three women and one teenage girl in
three states.
The man, Jeremy B. Jones, was arrested for minor offenses in Georgia
in January and June 2004. But Mr. Jones was released when
computerized fingerprint checks did not turn up a 2000 warrant for
him for rape, sodomy and jumping bail in Oklahoma.
The killings, most preceded by abduction and rape, have gripped
communities and frustrated investigators. In one case, residents of
Forsyth County, Ga., searched for a missing hairstylist for months
before the sheriff said Mr. Jones had confessed to killing her.
"The F.B.I. regrets this incident," Thomas Bush III, the assistant
director of Criminal Justice Information Services at the bureau,
said in a statement released Tuesday in response to inquiries from
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The agency said the mistake was "a result of a technical database
error, not a human examiner failing to make an appropriate match."
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Bush said the system was
more than 98 percent accurate and a vast improvement over manually
matching fingerprint cards, a process that used to take 15 to 25
days.
The computerized system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint
Identification System, was instituted in 1999 and usually has
results in less than two hours, he said.
"It's an exceptional tool for law enforcement," Mr. Bush said. "Is
it perfect? No."
Critics of the F.B.I. say the system's image resolution is too low
and the agency's faith in it is too high.
"Since they've gotten involved with computers, they've screwed up
everything," said Michael Cherry, a biometrics expert in New Jersey.
Mr. Jones, 32, is by many accounts a charming man. He told The Daily
Oklahoman that until he developed a methamphetamines habit, people
in his hometown, Miami, Okla., thought he could be president.
The drug, he said, led him down the wrong path, one that might have
been cut short at his first arrest in Georgia last year had he been
correctly identified. At that time, there was a warrant for his
arrest on charges stemming from two rapes in 1996 in Oklahoma and a
third rape in 2000. For the first two, he pleaded guilty to sexual
battery and methamphetamine possession. In 2000, he jumped bail.
By 2004 Mr. Jones was living just west of Atlanta, where he was
picked up in January on charges of trespassing. He gave the name
John Paul Chapman. His prints were sent to the F.B.I. to run against
the national database. No match turned up, and Mr. Jones was
released. The F.B.I. created a new record for his prints under the
name Chapman.
On Feb. 14, 2004, the body of Katherine Collins, a prostitute, was
found in a vacant lot in New Orleans. She had been raped, stabbed
and beaten.
In March, a 16-year-old girl, Amanda Greenwell, disappeared from a
trailer park in Douglas County, Ga., where the police later realized
Mr. Jones had been living. Her remains were found a month later.
On April 15, Patrice Endres, the hairstylist, was abducted from her
salon in Forsyth County.
In June, Mr. Jones was arrested for methamphetamine possession. The
F.B.I. computers hit only the Chapman prints. Again, he was
released.
On Sept. 18, Lisa Marie Nichols, 45, was found dead in her trailer
home in Mobile County, Ala. Mr. Jones, still going by the name
Chapman and staying nearby, was arrested three days later and
charged with capital murder, rape, kidnapping and burglary. The
authorities would not say how he came to be a suspect.
When Mobile County officials issued an alert to other jurisdictions
describing the crime, Missouri authorities sent notice that a John
Paul Chapman with the same birthday and Social Security number was
in their custody. After investigating, Mobile County officials
determined Mr. Jones's true identity and asked the F.B.I. to review
its database. The bureau then discovered its error.
Eleven law enforcement agencies have expressed an interest in
talking to Mr. Jones about unsolved crimes; the Oklahoma Bureau of
Investigation alone interrogated him about four killings. A
spokeswoman said Mr. Jones remained a "person of interest" in those
cases.
He has since been charged in the Collins and Greenwell killings. In
the Endres case, Sheriff Ted Paxton of Forsyth County said Mr. Jones
confessed but had not been charged, in part because the body had not
been found.
Mr. Jones has made other confessions. Investigators said that he
admitted to the Collins killing, and news reports indicated that he
told the authorities where he put the bodies of two teenage girls in
one of the Oklahoma cases.
Mr. Jones's lawyer in Alabama, Habib Yazdi, said he had sought,
unsuccessfully, for a judge to silence his client.
"He would say anything if they would let him talk to his wife and
his mother," Mr. Yazdi argued. "He would say, 'Tell me who was
missing, I'll tell you that I killed her.' He would say he killed
J.F.K. if he had been alive."
Mr. Yazdi said his client was mentally ill and would undergo a
psychiatric evaluation.
Ariel Hart contributed reporting for this article.
******************************************************************
Digitized prints can point
finger at innocent
Handling, quality of image are risks
By Flynn McRoberts and Steve Mills | Tribune staff reporters
January 3, 2005
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. - Deep inside a sprawling complex tucked in the
hills of this Appalachian town, a room full of supercomputers
attempts to sift America's guilty from its innocent.
This is where the FBI keeps its vast database of fingerprints,
allowing examiners to conduct criminal checks from computer screens
in less than 30 minutes--something that previously took them weeks
as they rummaged through 2,100 file cabinets stuffed with inked
print cards.
But the same digital technology that has allowed the FBI to speed
such checks so dramatically over the last few years has created the
risk of accusing people who are innocent, the Tribune has found.
Across the country, police departments and crime labs are submitting
fingerprints for comparisons and for entry into databases, using
digital images that may be missing crucial details or may have been
manipulated without the FBI knowing it.
Not unlike a picture from a typical digital camera, a digital
fingerprint provides less complete detail than a traditional
photographic image. That matters little with pictures from the
family vacation. But when the digital image is of a fingerprint, the
lack of precision raises the specter of false identifications in
criminal cases.
"There's a risk that not only would they exclude someone
incorrectly--we have the potential to identify someone incorrectly,"
said David Grieve, a prominent fingerprint expert who is the latent
prints training coordinator for the Illinois State Police crime lab
system.
An FBI-sponsored group of fingerprint examiners was concerned enough
about the quality of digital images that in 2001 it recommended
doubling their resolution. Three years later, though, the vast
majority of police agencies still use equipment with the lower
resolution.
Equally troublesome, the most commonly used image-enhancement
software, Adobe Photoshop, leaves no record of some of the changes
police technicians can perform as they clean up fingerprint images
to make them easier to compare.
This seemingly esoteric issue is crucial because it raises questions
about a bulwark of the criminal justice system: chain of custody. If
authorities cannot prove that a fingerprint is an accurate
representation of the original and show exactly how it was handled,
its validity can be questioned.
FBI officials recognize the resolution problem but say it leads to
overlooking guilty people, not falsely accusing the innocent.
"The risk that we're hearing is that we miss people--because the
resolution isn't enough--not that we're identifying people
incorrectly," said Jerry Pender, deputy assistant director at the
FBI's Clarksburg facility.
Potential for error rising
Such confidence is unwarranted, according to digital-imaging
specialists and some leading fingerprint experts. And they say the
potential for mistakes is growing inexorably as police departments
around the nation switch from old inked cards to digitized computer
images.
To do so, technicians scan an inked card into a computer, which
converts it into a pattern of 0s and 1s that digitally represent the
image, similar to how a fax machine works. And, like a fax machine,
the process of digitizing the fingerprint loses considerable amounts
of detail.
"It gives examiners the misleading impression that they're getting a
better-quality image to examine," said Michael Cherry, an imaging
expert who is on the evidentiary committee of the Association for
Information and Image Management, a business technology trade group.
"These images actually can eliminate fingerprint characteristics
that might exclude a suspect."
Measuring the number of cases in which a digital image may have
wrongly linked a suspect to a crime scene is difficult. The
technology is so new that many defense attorneys do not know to ask
if the fingerprint image entered into evidence has been digitized.
"I think it's a very real problem, but it's under the [radar]
still," said Mary Defusco, director of training at the Defender
Association of Philadelphia, a non-profit group that represents
indigent defendants. "We have to get up to speed on it."
One of the nation's first successful challenges to the use of
digital fingerprinting in the courtroom came in 2003 in Broward
County, Fla.
The only physical evidence linking Victor Reyes to the murder of
Henry Guzman was a partial palm print--an intriguing trace of
evidence found on duct tape used to wrap the body in a peach-colored
comforter.
A forensic analyst with the Broward County Sheriff's Office used a
software program known as MoreHits along with Adobe Photoshop to
darken certain areas and lighten others--a process called "dodge and
burn," which has long been used in traditional photography.
Reyes' attorney, Barbara Heyer, argued that such digital
enhancements were inappropriate manipulations of the evidence. "It
just hasn't gotten to the point of reliability," Heyer said.
Jurors acquitted Reyes, largely because of sloppy handling of the
evidence by police. But they also were troubled by the digital
fingerprinting technology used in the case. The jury foreman,
Richard Morris, who writes computer-imaging software for a living,
said in a recent interview that he and his fellow jurors had
significant concerns about it.
No record of image changes
"The makers of the [Adobe] software dropped the ball in not
providing a digital record of every action applied to the image,"
Morris said. He said he would like to see lab analysts or police
personnel use software that automatically would log any changes so
other examiners could determine later whether the digital print had
been altered inappropriately.
Ten years ago, only a handful of major police departments used
digital fingerprinting. Today, more than 80 percent of the prints
submitted to the FBI's Clarksburg facility are digital.
Along with the digital technology has come inexpensive software that
allows personnel at many police stations to enhance the prints at
their desks. One of the most widely used digital-print software
programs, MoreHits, claims about 150 clients among local, state,
federal and foreign law-enforcement agencies.
The creators of these explosively popular tools also recognize the
potential problems.
"It's like a hammer. It's not evil unless someone who is evil picks
it up and uses it," said Erik Berg, a forensic expert with the
Police Department in Tacoma, Wash., who developed MoreHits.
Human element crucial
Defenders of the technology contend that concerns about it are
overstated because computers only spit out a list of potential
matches; typically, human fingerprint examiners at the FBI's lab and
at state crime labs make the final matches introduced in court.
"The benefits to law enforcement with digital fingerprints are
incalculable in terms of speed of identification and exoneration of
the innocent," said Joseph Bonino, former chairman of the FBI's
advisory policy board for the Criminal Justice Information Services
division in Clarksburg. "They provide a high degree of accuracy,
assuming your human examiners are properly trained."
Trust in that safeguard took a major hit last spring when the FBI
falsely linked an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, to terrorist
bombings at Madrid train stations.
When Spanish authorities connected the Madrid print to an Algerian
man, the FBI had to admit it erred.
The bureau initially blamed the quality of a digital fingerprint
image forwarded from the Spanish National Police. An international
panel of experts later concluded that the digital image was fine;
instead, the panel found, several veteran FBI examiners had missed
"easily observed" details that excluded Mayfield.
Asked last month about the questions involving digital prints, the
FBI issued a statement saying it would not comment further until
eight teams of forensic scientists--appointed after the Mayfield
case unraveled--finish "methodically inspecting every aspect of the
latent fingerprint process, which includes the examination of
digital images."
The sleek computer equipment inside the bureau's facility in
Clarksburg cannot negate this disturbing fact: The FBI does not know
if a police agency has altered any of the thousands of new
fingerprint images added every day to its database, which now has 48
million sets of prints.
As long as the submissions meet FBI standards on resolution, size
and information about the subject, "we wouldn't have any concerns
about the quality of images coming into IAFIS," said Steve Fischer,
spokesman for the Clarksburg facility, referring to the FBI's
Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
Improprieties possible
But Fischer acknowledged that those standards are not a safeguard
against improper manipulation of the images.
"If they were doing something out there," he said, "we wouldn't know
about it."
The broader concern, though, remains the quality of the digital
images themselves. An FBI-sponsored scientific working group of
fingerprint experts cited concerns about the quality of digital
images in 2001, when it recommended doubling their resolution, from
500 pixels per inch to 1,000.
But that is only a guideline, and most police departments haven't
invested in newer equipment that would upgrade the digital images.
"The quality of the detail . . . in the [lower-resolution] digital
image is not sufficient to support a lot of what fingerprint
comparisons rely on," said Alan McRoberts, chairman of the working
group and editor of the Journal of Forensic Identification.
The roots of using digital images for crime-solving date to the
early 1970s, when San Diego police brought a palm print image to the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the hope that
scientists could enhance it.
Police had found a bloody palm print on a bedsheet at a murder
scene, but the weave of the sheet obscured the print's detail. The
lab's scientists managed to separate the print from the bedsheet's
weave using a process similar to one employed to enhance photographs
taken of the moon and planets.
Since then, the drop in prices for such technology has made it
widely available to law enforcement, but critics question whether
all police staffers using it fully understand its limitations.
One solution to the problem is simple, according to imaging experts:
Have defense attorneys ask the right questions.
Berg, the developer of the MoreHits software, outlined them: "If
this is a digital image, has it been enhanced or is this the
original capture with no changes to it? If it's been enhanced, I
want you to show me what you did and tell me what your training is.
And did you go out of your area of expertise to do this?"
If those questions aren't asked, Berg noted, a false identification
might not be caught.
************************************************************
___________________________________________________________________________
Terrorism & Security
posted November 30,
2006 at 12:45 p.m.
The Christian Science Monitor
"The
horrific pain, torture and
humiliation that this has caused
myself and my family is hard to put
into words," said Mr. Mayfield, an
American-born convert to Islam and a
former lieutenant in the Army.
"The days, weeks and months
following my arrest," he said, "were
some of the darkest we have had to
endure. I personally was subject to
lockdown, strip searches, sleep
deprivation, unsanitary living
conditions, shackles and chains,
threats, physical pain and
humiliation."
The Washington Post reports
that
the apology was "unusual" for the
FBI, and that
the payment (more than twice what
the government paid to Wen Ho Lee, a
US nuclear scientist who said
officials violated his privacy rights)
is a "clear embarrassment."
FBI examiners had erroneously
linked him to a partial fingerprint
on a bag of detonators found after
terrorists bombed commuter trains in
Madrid in March, killing 191 people.
The bureau compounded its error by
stridently resisting the conclusions
of the Spanish National Police,
which notified the FBI three weeks
before Mayfield was arrested that
the fingerprint did not belong to
him.
Mayfield's lawsuit alleged that
his civil rights had been violated
and that he was arrested because he
is a Muslim convert who had
represented some defendants in
terrorism-related cases.
The Los Angeles Times
reports that Spanish authorities,
who were dubious from the start
that the prints were Mayfield's,
eventually identified them as
belonging to an Algerian. Experts say
the case highlights the "error
potential" for fingerprint matching,
which they say is too high.
"This is a tip-of-the-iceberg
phenomenon," said Simon A. Cole, a
professor of criminology, law and
society at UC Irvine and author of
'Suspect Identities: A History of
Fingerprinting and Criminal
Identification.' The argument has
always been that no two people have
fingerprints exactly alike ... But
that's not what you need to have an
error. What you need is for two
people to have very similar
fingerprints, and that's what
happened here."
Michael Cherry, president of
Cherry Biometrics, an
identification-technology company,
said misidentification problems
could grow worse as the US and other
governments add more fingerprints to
their databases.
"I really believe there are a lot
more Mayfields out there," Cherry
said. "We just don't know about
these cases because the Spanish
police don't always get to oversee
them. We simply don't have an
identification standard that fits
with today's times."
The Times also writes that a report
on the Mayfield case, released last
January by Glenn Fine of the Office of
the Inspector General (the Justice
Department's internal watchdog), said
the bureau overlooked important
differences between Mayfield's and the
Algerian's prints. The report also
said the FBI basically ignored the
Spanish police when they said they had
the wrong man.
McClatchy reports that Mr.
Fine also said the case
did not entail government abuse of the
new powers it acquired as a result
of the Patriot Act, as the FBI did not
use those powers in survelliance of
Mayfield. Fine also said that
Mayfield's religion wasn't the "sole"
reason for his arrested, but
contributed to the failure "to
sufficiently reconsider the
identification after legitimate
questions about it were raised."
The Associated Press
reports, however, that in a separate
statement released Wednesday, Mayfield
said his religion was
one of the main reasons that he
was targeted by the FBI.
"Not only does my detention as a
material witness in the Madrid
bombing underscore the fallacy that
fingerprint identification is
reliable, I hope the public will
remember that the US Government also
targeted me and my family because of
our Muslim religion," he said.
In another case related to the
government's terrorism powers, a
federal judge has ruled
unconstitutional key portions of a
presidential order that blocks
financial assistance to terrorist
groups.
The Washington Post
reports that the provisions are
"impermissibly vague because they
allow the president to unilaterally
designate organizations as terrorist
groups and broadly prohibit
association with such groups."
Bruce Fein, a Justice Department
official in the Reagan years who has
criticized the Bush administration's
broad assertions of executive power,
said that appealing Collins's ruling
may carry more risks for the
government than simply changing the
executive order's language.
"If they take this up on appeal,
they risk another repudiation of
this omnipotent-presidency theory
that they have," Fein said.
|
|
|
|
Report blasts FBI lab
Peer pressure led to false ID of Madrid fingerprint
By Flynn McRoberts and Maurice Possley | Tribune staff reporters
November 14, 2004
Top FBI fingerprint examiners gave in to peer pressure when they
rushed to link an Oregon lawyer to a terrorist attack in Madrid this
year, according to a panel of forensic experts convened to explain
the highest-profile mistake in the history of modern fingerprint
comparison.
The finding contradicts the initial explanation given by the FBI,
which had blamed the quality of a digital fingerprint image sent by
Spanish police in the wake of the March 11 train bombings that
killed 191 people.
Instead, the panel found that human error, defensiveness and a
failure to follow some fundamental scientific practices, such as
proper peer review, led to four of the nation's top fingerprint
experts wrongly tying Brandon Mayfield, a Portland-area lawyer and a
Muslim, to the bombings. Spanish national police later matched the
print to an Algerian man.
"Once the mind-set occurred with the initial examiner, the
subsequent examinations were tainted," Robert Stacey, chief of the
FBI laboratory's quality assurance and training unit, wrote in a
report outlining the findings of the international review committee.
"To disagree was not an expected response."
The committee's findings underscored a central complaint about much
of forensic science: The purportedly unbiased, scientific evidence
introduced into American courts often fails to meet either of those
standards.
A recent Tribune investigation found that fingerprinting is so
subjective that the most experienced examiners can make egregious
mistakes.
The FBI had asked the review committee to examine how three of its
experts--and a fourth court-appointed expert--erred in declaring
Mayfield's prints a match to one found on a plastic bag at the scene
of the Madrid attack.
The committee convened at the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., for two days
in June. It was given access to the FBI case file and met with the
lab personnel involved in the Mayfield case. Stacey's report,
published in the Journal of Forensic Identification, summarized the
committee's review and its recommendations.
In reaching its conclusions, the panel didn't address the accusation
at the center of a civil lawsuit Mayfield has filed against the
federal government: That it targeted him because of his Muslim faith
and violated his civil rights, holding him in jail for two weeks.
The suit alleges that the examiners had access to background
information that showed Mayfield is a convert to Islam. He also had
represented, in a child custody suit, one of the men convicted in a
Portland terrorism case.
The committee's review prompted the FBI to form eight teams of
scientists--from inside and outside the bureau--to "address all the
concerns raised by the international panel," Ann Todd, spokeswoman
for the FBI lab, said Friday. "It's going above and beyond to make
sure that it doesn't happen again."
Todd would not comment further because of an ongoing investigation
of the Mayfield case by the Justice Department's inspector general.
Rush to conclusion
In laying out a timeline of the Mayfield fiasco, the report shows
how the FBI's Latent Print Unit rushed to conclude that Mayfield's
prints matched the print found at the crime scene.
His was one of those spit out when a supervisory fingerprint
examiner ran the crime scene print through a search of the FBI's
vast database--one of 20 prints with enough similarities to warrant
a manual comparison by an examiner.
On March 19, the FBI's Latent Print Unit made its initial report,
finding that the print on the bag matched Mayfield's. "The unit
chief provided this information by telephone to Interpol
Washington," Stacey's report notes. But "the unit chief did not
complete a thorough examination of the identification prior to
making the telephone call."
Some veteran fingerprint experts welcomed the report as a good first
step in confronting the fact that prominent fingerprint mistakes in
recent years have occurred at major, respected law-enforcement
agencies that employ well-trained examiners.
In addition to the Mayfield case, for instance, the Boston Police
Department earlier this year admitted that two of its fingerprint
examiners had linked Stephan Cowans to the 1997 shooting of a police
sergeant, though a later review found that Cowans' prints weren't
even close to those discovered at the scene.
The series of mistakes "means something. It means we have something
to learn about our process," said Gerald Clough, a latent-print
examiner and detective at a Texas sheriff's office. "Perhaps we have
something to learn about the limits of our process."
One of the problems with that process in the Mayfield mistake,
according to the committee, was the "inherent pressure of such a
high-profile case" and the fact that the first examiner to render an
opinion was a "highly respected supervisor with many years of
experience."
Noting that the mistake was made not just by individual examiners
but by an agency that considers itself one of the best latent-print
units in the world, Stacey wrote: "Confidence is a vital element of
forensics, but humility is too."
Yet when the Spanish police in May told the FBI that its examiners
were wrong, the bureau immediately became defensive, sending the
chiefs of its latent-print unit to Spain to explain how the FBI was
correct.
"This was interesting," the report noted, "considering that the
identification is filled with dissimilarities that were easily
observed when a detailed analysis of the latent print was
conducted."
Image quality not a factor
Despite earlier FBI attempts to blame the quality of the fingerprint
image--a digital representation e-mailed to the U.S. by Spanish
authorities--the report states that "all of the committee members
agree that the quality of the images that were used to make the
erroneous identification was not a factor."
Still, some experts questioned whether many fingerprint examiners
fully understand the potential problems posed by using digital
images of prints, instead of the old inked print cards. Digital
images, though they may appear to be perfectly clear, can be less
sharp than the original inked print or a film photo of it.
Because these possible image distortions are caused by computer
technology, fingerprint experts are ill-suited to identify them,
according to Michael Cherry, a biometrics expert who is on the
evidentiary committee of the Association for Information and Image
Management.
"The FBI needs improved computer standards," Cherry said. "I really
believe there's a lot more Mayfields out there. We just don't know
about them because the Spanish government doesn't overlook our
work."
Bureau officials had claimed a flawless record until the FBI falsely
linked Mayfield to the bombings.
To prevent such a mistake from happening again, the committee
suggested a new quality assurance rule for "high-profile or
high-pressure cases," including "supervisory verification of
conclusions regardless of the normal quality and quantity standard."
The journal report already has set off debate and comment among
fingerprint examiners, with some questioning why so-called heater
cases should be given greater care.
"Every case should have the same safeguards," said Joseph Polski,
chief operations officer of the International Association for
Identification, the leading professional organization of fingerprint
examiners. "Some people's life and liberty shouldn't be of more
priority than other people's life and liberty."
In one online forum, another examiner said she thought it was "funny
how they are recommending new procedures for high-profile and
international cases."
"In my mind, every identification is just as important as the
previous one. The type of case or who [is] asking for the
information should have no reflection on my analysis," wrote Michele
Triplett, a fingerprint examiner with the King County Sheriff's
Office in Seattle. "I find the circular reasoning to be typical."
While crediting the FBI Latent Print Unit personnel for their
"forthright manner in accepting responsibility" and the lab for
taking "immediate steps to remedy the situation," the committee also
noted the need for improvements throughout the latent-print
community.
The committee recommended that an initial examiner's conclusion be
sealed or withheld from subsequent verifiers to ensure an
independent opinion.
And quality assurance programs ought to be designed so examiners are
"encouraged to step forward, without fear of reprisal, if they
disagree. This part of the scientific method must be
institutionalized," Stacey wrote.
The report also calls for verifiers to be given challenging
fingerprint cases during blind proficiency tests to ensure that
their methods are correct and to detect "skill atrophy."
Acknowledging errors
Stacey emphasized the need for a lab culture where mistakes can be
acknowledged quickly and addressed. "Many agencies are slow to do
this or refuse to admit that errors have occurred," he wrote.
"Admitting the error is the first step in the remediation process."
Barry Scheck, president of the National Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers, said the report amounts to "a powerful statement
and something that critics of forensic science have been saying for
a long time."
Said Scheck: "This demonstrates that examiner bias is an extremely
serious problem in fingerprint identification."
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