| Author | Message | ||
     David Fairhurst |
Kerri, Quite simply, no. In fact any sort of similarity you may be thinking of would most likely be coincidental and is of no use in linking crimes or excluding suspects. We can only make positive identifications when we have prints from the same area of skin. Either by identifying one latent against another to link crimes or by identifying latents against inked prints to identify a suspect. We can only exclude persons when we know which part of the hand made the latent and we have looked at the same part of the suspect's prints. (or if we don't know exactly where the latent came from, if we have looked at all the possible places) I suppose we could determine that two crimes were not comitted by the same person if: 1, we know that the latents we had were definitely the criminals in each case, and 2, we have latents from the same part of the hand. This is not a very likely scenario but I am sure some examiners will have done something like this at some time. (If anyone has, maybe it would be an unusual and interesting case history they could share with us in this forum  ) David ?:^) | ||
| Kerri |
Are there enough similarities between one person's fingers to either draw suspicion or exclude a suspect in two different crimes in which prints from two different fingers were left? | ||
| Kasey Wertheim |
Adrian, It's all exactly the same principle. No two areas of skin are the same. This goes for fingers, toes, thumbs, portions of the palm, etc... -Kasey | ||
| Adrian Smith |
I know that no two fingerprints are alike, but are both of my thumbs the exact same print, or are they differend? |
