From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.
Phrenology, voice stress analysis, lie detectors, etc. - There’s a long list of things that don’t really work being used by law enforcement to help put lot of innocent people in prison.
Fingerprints might not be on the same level of fraudulent bullshit of the above, but they also shouldn’t be the unquestionable end-all be-all of proof either.
They aren’t on the same level of fraudulent bullshit, but they’re close.
Fingerprint matching is done “by eye” and often involves an “expert” saying that one smudge is a 100% match for another smudge.
DNA matching is the only forensic science that’s worth a damn, and only if it’s done correctly.
And even that one is useless in case of identical twins.
And it’s easy to get a contaminated sample. There have been plenty of convictions based on DNA that have been overturned.
The article headline is misleading. Nothing in the study indicates that fingerprints can’t be used to uniquely identity people. It claims to show that although each fingerprint on a single person is unique, they have similar features. Thus, one could assess whether a pair of fingerprints come from the same person.