| Author | Message | ||
     Ed German |
In thinking of multiple latent finger or palm prints in the same area, imagine dipping a rubber stamp into melted butter and depositing impressions thirty or forty times on the side of a small drinking glass. You can apply black fingerprint powder and develop the butter deposits. One of the rubber stamp impressions is definitely going to be on top... but, you may not be able to read it. Although latent prints are seldom deposited in butter, the general effect of overlapping impressions is similar. Because of varying contrast, color, or ridge alignment, sometimes impressions can be identified even though they overlap... and sometimes digital image processing (density slicing, color filtering, edge enhancement, etc.) can render ridge detail identifiable. The underlying impressions on your evidence may have caused too much background noise to enable identification of the "top" print or prints. | ||
| Catherine |
I was recently told that too many prints were on the gun to get a clean print. I always thought if you had multiple prints on an item one would have to be on top... |
