| Author | Message | ||
     Richard Fairchild (Rich) Member Username: Rich Post Number: 3 Registered: 02-2012 |
Unless your agency's policy or some law or legal precedent in your jurisdiction precludes such identifications, they can be included in your reports and presented in court. This topic is addressed in the SWGFAST Standard for Simultaneous Impression Examination. That standard addresses simultaneously impressed (adjacent) fingers as well as situations like this where you may see sufficient quality (clarity) and quantity of information to conclude that friction ridge detail on both sides of the blur were impressed simultaneously and can thus be considered as one impression. | ||
| Ian Fleming (Bondy) Member Username: Bondy Post Number: 3 Registered: 10-2011 |
I would like to know how other experts would consider a latent that they believe matches a suspect's print but may not deem it suitable for court presentation because identifying details in the latent are 'split' by an aberration of some sort - eg a latent presents with a central blurred area with identifying details on either side of the blur. Considering only the details on 1 side may be deemed insufficient to conclude individualization but can you consider both sides of the print even though you cannot directly 'count' the ridges between each side due to the blurred part of the latent - I was always told by cranky old senior fingerprint experts that if you couldn't do a court chart for a print you couldn't make it an identification - so if I prepared a court chart I couldn't demonstrate that a characteristic on 1 side of the impression is eg 12 intervening friction ridges from a characteristic on the other side because I couldn't 'count' through the 'blurred area'. Would this be a practice followed in most Fingerprint Bureaux? |
