Crime scene investigators use black powder to find two fingerprints on the counter at the scene of a burglary. The first fingerprint is a loop pattern and the second fingerprint is a whorl. Investigators looked through their fingerprint cards (they're not familiar with AFIS) and found a someone who had both loop and whorl fingerprint patterns on the same hand as the crime scene prints. They arrested them, confident they had found the perpetrator. 1. Why are they wrong to be confident in their arrest and what errors in investigating fingerprints did they make ? You should discuss at least three reasons.
These are the reasons why the investigators are wrong to be confident in the arrest that they made:
They are wrong due to the fact that there is no case of a perfect finger match between the person that they have arrested and the finger print that they found on this crime scene. They did not carry out enough comparisons.
Another reason is the fact that a whorl fingerprint and a loop from a finger cannot give different prints that they saw on the scene of the crime.
Lastly a lot of people could have loops and whorl prints on their hands. Therefore this would mean that they may have accused a wrong person.
What are AFIs?
These are fingerprint identification systems that are used in forensics to analyze and also come to conclusions on the digitalized fingerprints of people.
