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The Case of Junk Science - Fingerprint Evidence
📻 Episode #398
🎙️ Hosted by Jason Flom
📅 Oct 16, 2023
About This Episode
Contrary to what pop culture has ingrained in the American conscience, matching known fingerprints of a suspect to prints left at the scene of a crime is not an exact science. It’s entirely subjective. So how did fingerprints become so widely accepted and thought of as the gold standard, as fool proof evidence?
The Case
Contrary to what pop culture has ingrained in the American conscience, matching known fingerprints of a suspect to prints left at the scene of a crime is not an exact science. It’s entirely subjective. So how did fingerprints become so widely accepted and thought of as the gold standard, as fool proof evidence?
Josh Dubin discusses Fingerprint Evidence with Mary Moriarty, former Chief Public Defender of Hennepin County in Minnesota.
Kate Judson, Executive Director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, updates Josh Dubin's Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science.
https://cifsjustice.org/donate/
https://www.maryforhennepin.com/meet-mary
https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/junk-science
In Their Own Words — transcript excerpts
Short excerpts from the episode's official published transcript, with timestamps — listen from these moments, or read the full transcript via the podcast's own platforms.
00:03:56“Speaker 2: but you've never actually done it yourself. You have no record. Speaker 2: I've never been fingerprinted before. Not long after that, the Speaker 2: police call you into the station one more time, but Speaker 2: something has shifted. They bring you into an interrogation room. Speaker 2: The first thing they do is show you a polaroid”
00:16:54“Speaker 4: and actually trying to lift the prints from them. Speaker 2: Well, I think I was like screw and around with Speaker 2: a Rubik's cube and playing with Gi Joe figures. So Speaker 2: this makes me feel a little bit insecure about what Speaker 2: I was doing as a kid. But it certainly sounds”
00:28:44“Speaker 4: it doesn't know what the result was actually, So the Speaker 4: fact that the verification wasn't blind led to what people Speaker 4: call confirmation bias, which is a huge problem. Speaker 2: All right. So, once the NAS basically said that the Speaker 2: ACV process is really a recipe for wrongful convictions, this”
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Also on the podcast: #145 Junk Science - Bite Mark Evidence · #147 Junk Science - Bloodstain Pattern Evidence · #149 Junk Science - Arson Evidence