San Jose Criminal Law Office

Until March, 2009, the San Jose Police Central Identification Unit, who processed all fingerprint examinations for Santa Clara County, has been withholding full examination results from attorneys in criminal cases. The publicly known procedure in all but murder cases has been for one technician to compare a fingerprint lifted at a crime scene to the known prints in the database to determine whether there was a “match.” After the first examiner reviewed the prints, a second technician would check the results of the first one. It was not reported as a “match” unless both analysts agreed.

Many people who have fingerprint “matches” have been convicted after jury trials or advised by their attorneys that they cannot beat the case and should take a plea deal.

The San Jose Mercury News recently learned that in reality when two technicians did not agree on a match, a third technician was routinely called in. Then the “match” report was generated, but only reported the agreement between two technicians. Examiners called in criminal trials have never testified that a “tiebreaker” was involved.

The SJPD continued with this secret policy even when the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office as well as other agencies informed the SJPD this procedure was not legally correct. When police representatives were asked for record for tiebreaker cases, the media was informed that no records exist for the times that a “match” was the result of three examiners instead of two.

Fingerprints were once considered the gold standard in identification of suspects. This has come under fire in the last few years. In 2005, at the Madrid terrorist train bombing which killed 191 people, fingerprints pointed to a lawyer who resided in Oregon. It was later determined that it was impossible that this person was present at the bombing, despite FBI confirmation that the prints from Spain matched the prints from the American lawyer.

The recently released National Academy of Sciences report has also called certain “CSI” type methods into question, including fingerprints, and hair and fiber comparison, based on the lack of science supporting some of these forensic science methods routinely used in Criminalistics Laboratories.

If you have a case where fingerprints are involved, you need an attorney who is familiar with forensic issues, both nationally and locally. Maureen Baldwin has numerous years of experience with serious felony trials that have involved fingerprint, DNA, and other forensic procedures. You need an experienced attorney on your side to spot and attack these issues which often result in a criminal conviction and long prison sentences.

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