4
The Angry Brigade and the Fallibility of Forensic Science
The drugs cases of my early years as a practising barrister made me ever more aware that for most legal practitioners science was a blind spot – as it had been for me – principally on account of there being a lamentable dearth of scientific training and education. I started to put the principles of scientific method to the test.
In so many of the drugs cases on which I cut my legal teeth there was an issue about the nature and amount of the drug, as well as where it had been found, and my clients regularly made allegations that the drugs had been ‘planted’. Sometimes a drug had in fact been planted in a pocket, but sometimes not. On other occasions there was merely a claim that it had been found there. In those circumstances I began to ask what appear now to be rather simple and obvious questions. For example:
Has anyone examined the pocket for traces of the drug concerned?
Unheard of; never done; too time-consuming.
Has any wrapping been examined for fingerprints?
Not considered.
Has the substance been matched with any other drug recovered from the same source?
Not contemplated.
In one particular case, drugs had been stolen from a chemist’s shop, and in the process a window had been broken and particles of glass ended up on the intruder’s clothing – particularly in the turn-ups of his trousers. A match was said to have been achieved between the shop glass and the glass found on my client. This was based on what is called the ‘refractive index’ of the glass itself – refraction is like the bent image you get when you stick your finger in water – and as usual everyone expected that this evidence would go unchallenged as being incontrovertible. To the chagrin of the judge, I did not allow the expert’s report to be read, but asked him to attend for cross-examination. I wanted to discover what methods, protocols and procedures were in place at the laboratory; furthermore, I wanted to know how the refractive index had been calculated.
The expert wasn’t used to having to testify. He arrived with a well-worn, brown Home Office briefcase in which he carried his papers and the exhibits. When my turn came to put my questions, I asked him to produce the test tube containing the particles of glass. He fumbled in the case and drew it out. In a moment of seeming satisfaction he held it aloft and shook it – and to his amazement the test tube was silent. From then on I nicknamed him ‘Tinkerbelle’. But that was not all. It turned out that he had signed a statement for work he had not carried out himself, and that there were no adequate records from the lab about the examination, let alone the methods used. It goes without saying that it is absolutely vital to preserve the sample whenever possible and record precisely the methods and results of the tests, so that another scientist can come along and replicate everything in order to verify it. (These are the principles of ‘interverifiability’ and ‘reproducibility’.)
The chance to explore these avenues in a more significant way came in 1972 with my first major case. Gordon Carr, in his book about this case,1 dubbed the accused ‘Britain’s first urban guerrillas’. Like most other European countries in the early 1970s, the UK had its own brand: there was the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany and the Red Brigade in Italy; ours had the rather Monty Pythonesque name of the Angry Brigade. I had read about them in the papers, but only with passing interest. Their main targets were banks, embassies and the homes of senior Conservative politicians, like the Attorney General Sir Peter Rawlinson, all attacked between 1970 and 1971. But in all the twenty-five bombings attributed to the Brigade – including one audacious attack on the Post Office Tower in central London – no one was killed. So they were seen as more of an embarrassment to the government than a serious threat, a ‘leftist cult of hippies and weirdos’, as the papers put it, though in fact they were campaigning against Lord Donaldson’s Industrial Relations Bill, which at the time proposed serious restrictions on trade-union rights.
I scarcely noticed the reports of eight young people being arrested after a police swoop on a north London house in August 1971, and when Bernie turned up at my home in Priory Gardens, off the Archway Road, late one Sunday evening to talk about a client, I assumed it would be another drugs case. But this case turned out to be different – so different that he hadn’t felt able to discuss it over the phone – and it was the first time I had been offered something with serious social and political overtones. For his part, Bernie was in a state of excitement, because it was a high-profile event, and as soon as I had heard him out, I agreed to act as barrister for his client. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.
Bernie had been instructed by a young telephonist called Angela Weir, who along with seven other defendants had been charged with planting small explosive devices outside London businesses and the home of Employment Secretary Robert Carr, in ‘an attempt to awaken democracy’. Also known as the Stoke Newington Eight, the group held a mish-mash of libertarian and militant beliefs strongly influenced by anarchism and the Situationists, the radical international political and artistic movement.
The defendants included John Barker; Jim Greenfield; Hilary Creek and Anna Mendleson, the daughters of a leading landowner and the Mayor of Manchester respectively; and Stuart Christie, a peripatetic anarchist who had previously been imprisoned in Spain for carrying explosives with the intent to assassinate the dictator General Franco. The trial of the Angry Brigade was the culmination of 1960s radicalism.
I hadn’t met any so-called ‘terrorists’ before, but Angela struck me as a very unlikely one. She was small, articulate and polite, and we talked a great deal about her life, her views, her politics: she was clearly very bright and not a bomber. As we talked, I wanted to be able to identify with her as much as I could, to be standing in her place; I wanted to be able to feel as she did, so that I could genuinely communicate those feelings in court. It may sound like acting, but it isn’t. You have to be able to activate those emotions in yourself in order to be convincing. A dispassionate delivery just doesn’t work.
As the case entered court on 30 May 1972, public sentiments were riding high on a tide of media prejudice. As it happened, the prosecutor was a well-known, senior Treasury Counsel John Mathew, who was a leading member of my own set of chambers, highly skilled and thorough and with a reputation second to none. The chambers at Five Paper Buildings was regarded as a top prosecuting set, and for me to develop high-profile defence work there was slightly quirky – especially when the opposition was in the room next door. John was meticulously professional and I learned a massive amount from his ordered and focused techniques. There were no tensions within the set, but it was not easy from a public point of view to explain the apparent contradiction in this working relationship.
The prosecution’s case against Angela rested mainly on a scientific assessment of a false passport the police had found in the name of ‘Rosemary Pink’, which they claimed had been forged by Angela. Usually such cases depended on a prosecution expert witness claiming that the ‘questioned’ handwriting contained characteristics that were the same, or similar, to those in the ‘control’ sample belonging to the accused. The defence customarily produced a different expert to say that it wasn’t the same, or that he or she couldn’t be sure that it was. Then it was up to the jury to decide. In those days juries tended to trust the prosecution, but to me this approach lacked an important element of scientific rigour. So I tried something that had never been done before.
I asked not one but a number of handwriting experts to conduct blind tests independently of, and unknown to, each other. Some felt so threatened that they refused, but finally three agreed to look at a series of different, unidentified samples of handwriting. Some were Angela’s (the control sample), some were her relatives’, others were by unrelated persons and still others were from the (‘questioned’) passport. This meant that the experts did not know where any of the samples had come from or whether more than one had been written by the same person. The key question I posed was whether they could determine if any of the samples were written by the same person. This entirely novel approach was intended to counteract the inevitable influences of preconception, preconditioning and prejudice – for science, unlike beauty in art, should not reside principally in the eye of the beholder.
It was an unprecedented challenge. In those days no one questioned experts, especially not your own. No one put their proficiency to the test. But I did, and I had to explain to the Legal Aid Board why there was a need for so many witnesses and their costs. There was judicial consternation when I clearly showed that handwriting ‘expertise’ was not a science but an art, and a highly subjective one at that. In Angela’s case all the experts disagreed, and the resulting confusion and conflict between the ‘scientific’ views ensured her acquittal.
I remember Mother sitting at the back of the Old Bailey, slightly bemused.
I incurred judicial disapproval in two ways during this case. First, I was prepared to help Anna Mendleson, a co-defendant who was granted bail on very strict conditions, by driving her to court every day from the home of her solicitor, Michael Seifert, an old school friend who lived round the corner from me. This was unheard-of conduct – before the Angry Brigade trial and even possibly since.
Second, I encountered the judicial phrase ‘Mr Mansfield, I cannot see you’, which was directed at you if you appeared before a judge in clothing that was sartorially unacceptable. I disliked the uniform worn by most barristers in that early period – black jacket, waistcoat and pinstriped trousers – and instead invested in what I thought was a rather smart double-breasted, dark-blue blazer with gun-metal buttons. The height of chic! I was invited ‘round the back’ to the judge’s chamber for some elliptical words of advice.
In those days there were other arcane customs at the Bar. Barristers never shook hands with one another – I mean, you had to have a hand forever ready to draw your sword. They never addressed each other by their first names: whatever next, for familiarity breeds . . . I could never get used to all this and often faced retreating, wincing fellow members of the Bar.
During the trial there was a wonderful moment. One afternoon a co-defending counsel stood up with a seemingly serious application about the appalling cell conditions at the Old Bailey, and when taxed by the judge about the exact nature of the complaint, produced from underneath his seat a huge pink birthday cake with candles – which he had asked me to light while he was speaking. It was his client’s birthday and the jailers had refused to let the cake into the cell, so he produced it in court. His client was very touched and so was the judge, but in a different way.
The Angry Brigade trial was one of the longest criminal trials in English history, lasting over six months from May to December 1972. Four of the defendants were convicted, but – with a jury rider for mercy on the grounds that their motivation was understood, which the judge graciously implemented – they only got ten years in prison each. Stuart Christie went on to become a prolific writer, best known for My Granny Made Me an Anarchist.
In the end it was a triumph for Angela, for Bernie and for me, as Angela was acquitted and went on to make a reputable and successful career in gay-rights advocacy as Director of Stonewall, the gay/lesbian pressure group, and Director of the UK Government’s Women and Equality Unit. She was awarded an OBE in 1999.
A triumph, but this was just the beginning of a long battle against the unquestioning use of scientific evidence in British courts, culminating in the very basis of forensics being challenged in the notorious ‘fingerprint on the bomb’ case in 2001. But more of that later . . .
For me, another repercussion of the Angry Brigade case lay in its political context, and it was not long before whispers about my being a dangerous subversive started to reach my ears. Me a subversive? Nothing could have been further from the truth. My upbringing and political experience had been thoroughly middle-class and conventional, and it was hardly surprising that the emergent radical consciences of the mid-1960s had not featured on my radar before my involvement in the Angry Brigade case. I was not much older than the eight in the dock. They were intelligent and articulate; I was politically naive. The ideas and issues raised during the trial concerning the injustice wrought by the exigencies of capitalism, and the operation of state agencies in perpetuating this, gave me considerable food for thought. I was familiar from university with the concept of anarchism, but Situationism was a new one on me.
From the late 1950s this had been a movement describing, with considerable foresight, the way in which rapidly developing new technologies were creating an unreal society, one indirectly experienced by all of us. Over the years I have characterised this as a screen culture that has vastly increased with the advent of the Internet, cable and satellite television, mobile phones and laptops. We have become an audience in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’,2 susceptible to being manipulated and controlled, and this may explain my long-standing hostility to the corruptible information highway of websites and emails.
My first brush with radicalism had aroused only a spirit of enquiry rather than a conversion, so the whispers about my subversiveness didn’t bother me that much. It all struck me as typically British: you show interest or regard for other people and you run the risk of being branded a revolutionary, when in fact revolution (let alone armed revolution) could not have been further from my thoughts. Of course it was a risk being associated with what was then called ‘alternative thinking’, but it was a risk I was prepared to take, and the special benefit was that I was soon being asked to take on other controversial and high-profile cases.
Henceforward I was the Red under every legal bed – and funnily enough, Keele had been known as ‘the Kremlin on the Hill’, while the ‘Kremlin’ label had also been applied to Cloisters, the chambers to which I moved in 1973.
The Head of Cloisters was John Platts Mills (JPM), an eccentric, erudite, maverick ex-Labour MP, and I was part of a team led by him in another groundbreaking forensic exercise.
In 1975 Cornelius McFadden and seven others were accused of a conspiracy to cause explosions in clothing shops in Uxbridge, Welwyn Garden City and London’s West End by means of firebombs contained in cigarette packets. Many of these did not detonate and were therefore recovered, and one of McFadden’s fingerprints was alleged to have been on the face of an alarm clock used as a timing device. The defendant vehemently denied touching the clock, but there was no innocent explanation for the fingerprint’s presence, so we had to examine whether it was possible for it to have been planted.
Despite some reluctance and resistance by those experts we approached to the very idea that a print could be moved, we were able to work out in principle how this could happen. When it came to cross-examining the prosecution fingerprint expert, JPM, a tall, quizzical figure peering over his pince-nez, began by feigning ignorance and asking seemingly unambiguous and straightforward questions. In essence, if a mark made by grease from sweat on the skin can be lifted from a crime scene and then deposited onto a laboratory slide, is there any reason why it cannot also be placed on any other surface?
The expert was of course adamant this was not possible. The cross-examination went something like this:
But if it was, asks JPM, what kind of surface provides the best receptor?
Glass.
As if by magic, JPM produces from below his bench a small sheet of plate glass. Like this? How do you detect the mark?
By dusting it with powder.
What kind of powder do you use?
Ninhydrin. JPM produces some fine aluminium powder in a tin, like talcum
powder. How do you put the powder onto the mark?
With a brush.
Out comes a fine-art paintbrush. Like this?
JPM then proceeds to brush the powder delicately onto the thumbprint he has left on the glass. This reveals the contours and ridge characteristics of his mark.
So now, how do you get the dusted mark onto a laboratory’s glass slide?
With sticky tape.
JPM picks up a roll of Sellotape and cuts off a section. We are nearing the climax, as JPM places the tape on the dusted mark and then transfers it deftly onto another glass surface I swiftly hand him. Hey presto!*
It was a masterclass in logic and finesse so gripping that in court you couldn’t even hear the proverbial pin drop. Mr Justice Melford ‘Truncheons’ Stevenson had an apoplectic fit and docked all our fees. We were accused of being mere ‘mouthpieces’ for wicked allegations being contrived by enemies of the state, and in those circumstances we could not expect the hand that fed us (legal aid) to underwrite such calumny with any money for all the time ‘wasted’ on this part of the case. The Court of Appeal disagreed and reinstated our fees.
There were, however, some complications from a forensic point of view with JPM’s exposition. How do you remove the Sellotape from the transposed mark without leaving an outline of the sticky tape? How do you prevent some of the fingerprint powder remaining on the transferred mark? Most of all, the whole operation would necessitate corruption on a massive scale by SOCOs (Scene of Crime Officers), laboratory assistants, liaison officers, exhibits officers and fingerprint experts themselves.
McFadden was convicted, but JPM had shaken the self-satisfaction of experts and caused a reappraisal of the apparently irrefutable.
Thereafter, he travelled the world on diplomatic missions to Iron Curtain countries and left-wing regimes as an unofficial troubleshooter, and was my predecessor as President of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. A favourite image is from the notorious and long-running Grunwick dispute in the late 1970s. A group of Asian women had been denied the right to join a trade union, and Grunwick had swiftly become a symbol for the assertion of workers’ rights, drawing hundreds of protesters from all over the UK to the processing laboratories in north London. On more than one occasion the pickets were famously led by JPM, resplendent in bowler hat and pinstripes.
JPM was an outstanding and courageous barrister, and I was thrilled when in the final years of his life he joined my chambers at Tooks Court, where he was still practising at the age of ninety.
Fingerprinting was once again put under the microscope in 1998 when I took the appeal of Gilbert ‘Danny’ McNamee.
He had been born into a strife-ridden Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, in September 1960, and after graduating from Queen’s University, Belfast, became an electronic engineer employed by Kimball’s in Dundalk, making circuits for gaming machines.
McNamee led a seemingly ordinary life until he was arrested on 16 August 1986 at his home by the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary and flown to London, where he was charged with conspiracy to cause explosions in the Hyde Park bombing in July 1982, which had killed four soldiers and seven horses. At his trial at the Old Bailey he denied even having sympathy for the IRA, and no evidence was presented that he had any paramilitary links.
The Crown’s case rested on three fingerprints: one each on short lengths of insulating tape in two caches of explosives-making equipment discovered near Pangbourne in Berkshire and in Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire, and a left thumbprint on a Duracell battery recovered from the debris after a controlled explosion in Kensington.
The Crown argued that the ‘artwork’ used in the manufacture of circuit boards found in these locations was so similar that all the boards were made by ‘the same original master’ – who, they asserted, was McNamee. This evidence, together with all the emotive links to the Hyde Park bombing, added up to what seemed an impressive case.
At his trial, McNamee’s defence was that, although he was unable to explain the thumbprint, there was an innocent explanation for the two fingerprints, in that he may have touched parts of the reels of tape in his everyday work as an electronic engineer. If bomb-making had been going on, he was unaware of it. The judge, however, claimed that ‘two prints . . . could have an innocent explanation; but three prints are beyond coincidence’.
After five hours of deliberation by the jury, McNamee was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He then lost his appeal and, facing a lifetime behind bars, in September 1994 joined six other prisoners in trying to escape from Whitemoor Prison, shooting and wounding a prison warder as they went, before being captured two hours later. I represented a co-defendant in that trial, which collapsed when the Evening Standard published prejudicial material and was held to be in contempt of court.
McNamee’s case was eventually referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1998, when I was briefed by Gareth Peirce along with my junior Henry Blaxland.
I had known Gareth for a number of years and had worked with her on all manner of criminal matters. She has a strong civil-rights background in the USA and a deep sense of injustice, and we gelled from the beginning, each knowing exactly what the other needed for a case. Her preparation is immaculate and immense – each brief or set of instructions reads like a book – and she has a facility for entering the lives of others completely. Every dimension of a case is explored, something I’d always tried to do from my early days in the drug-advice centres. Gareth Peirce was and remains unique, with a quiet and deliberate persistence that is unnerving and capable of unravelling the most complex situations.
The McNamee case really set me thinking, and I decided to practise analysis of the swirls and whorls of my own thumbprint at home while preparing for court. But what should I use to transfer my print to paper for the purpose? My second wife Yvette came up to my study one evening to find sheets of apparently blood-stained thumbprints scattered around the room.
What on earth had I been doing? Well, I’d sneaked down to the kitchen and taken my favourite vegetable out of the fridge, then conducted my own tests with beetroot juice. It was fascinating.
The point is that individual prints are unique, but analysis depends on the clarity of reproduction. In an ideal world of controlled conditions, it is straightforward to obtain two prints from the same finger, which can be compared – but not so when the same finger is placed, often inadvertently, on a contaminated surface during the commission of a crime. The ability to discern a match of characteristics may then become highly subjective. In order to minimise this risk, it is once again crucial to ensure an element of blind testing. A number of different independent experts need first to examine the crime-scene mark to establish a consensus on which characteristics are capable of comparison. When it comes to the control print, the examiner should not know whether it belongs to a suspect, an arrestee or A. N. Other. Strictly speaking, there should be several controls submitted, blind; and with the help of computer imaging this exercise should be possible against a databank of retained prints.
As it happens I witnessed a demonstration of computer imaging whilst addressing the annual conference of the Finger Print Society in Manchester in March 2009. A Scene of Crime Officer (SOCO) using compact portable equipment can now electronically image a finger mark at the scene of a crime, and then transmit it electronically from the scene direct to the laboratory. This process provides speed, accessibility and, most importantly, high resolution imagery.
Over the course of seven days at the McNamee appeal, I took on the scientists, this time challenging the basic tenets of fingerprinting. Fourteen different experts from at least five different fingerprint bureaux throughout the UK were called, and the spectrum of disagreement over McNamee’s mark was enormous, from ‘unreadable’ to ‘more convinced than ever’. It even became apparent that different experts had assigned the same characteristic to different parts of the same thumb. In the court’s judgment this was both ‘remarkable and worrying’. For there to be no unanimity between them and very substantial areas of disagreement came as a shock, considering that all the experts save one were currently employed in various police forces across the land.
It was also revealed during the hearing that although the police had found a solitary print of McNamee’s in the Pangbourne cache, they had found on the same circuits twenty-four much more prominent prints belonging to known IRA bomb-maker Desmond Ellis. But this evidence had not been disclosed at McNamee’s original trial.
The Court of Appeal upheld McNamee’s appeal on 17 December 1998,3 and in the wake of this verdict the evidential standard of sixteen ridge characteristics for court purposes has been revisited, as have the protocols for quality control and independent verification. Danny McNamee is now a practising solicitor in Belfast.
Nevertheless, the risks remain amply demonstrated by a recent miscarriage of justice in Scotland involving a police officer, Shirley McKee, accused of touching a surface near the scene of a murder. And in another case in the USA in 2004, Brandon Mayfield was wrongly linked to the Madrid train bombings by FBI fingerprint experts.
These anomalies prompted a senior lecturer in cognitive neuroscience affiliated to University College London and Cognitive Consultants International to examine how objective the science really was. Dr Itiel Dror4 carried out his investigation by seeing if the same expert would make the same decision on the same fingerprint if presented with it in a different context: another form of blind testing.
Dror approached six international experts, including one in the UK, with eight crime-scene marks and eight control prints from suspects. The experts had in fact previously compared them in earlier cases and had deemed four matches and four exclusions. None of the experts knew they were re-examining marks they had seen before or that they were participating in a research project, and only two of the six experts came up with the same decision they’d made previously. The majority had changed their opinions. QED.
Meanwhile, back at the lab, the show goes on. The latest hot forensic tool is the analysis of earprints, which is going through all the perennial problems I’ve described so far. It seems the lessons have to be learned all over again.
The earprint (like the fingerprint) is unique to each of us and has features that are genetic and formed in the womb: its overall dimensions, the outer rim or helix, the lobe, the semicircular protrusion next to the jawbone called the tragus – these are the gross anatomical features. But in addition there are minutiae such as creases, notches and nodules. Unlike the finger, however, the ear has a very different interaction with the surface it presses against. Questions arise about whether the same ear can produce the same mark on more than one occasion under similar conditions or, more importantly, whether different ears might produce similar marks. Much will depend on pressure and malleability.
Mark Kempster was arrested in connection with a number of burglaries carried out in 2000. The case against him on the main burglary rested on an earprint found on a downstairs window pane. Either burglars are getting more careless or no one spotted the possible use of earprints before, despite everyone knowing about finger-, foot- and shoeprints. It seems the would-be intruder susses out his target by listening hard by a window for sounds of movement inside. Glass, as we’ve seen, is a perfect surface for retaining marks – unless, that is, it’s raining or the windows are cleaned regularly . . .
Kempster was apprehended before any earprint comparison had been made. When interviewed by police he strenuously denied any involvement in the burglary, although it transpired that he did know the occupier and had done work at the address. Once the police received the firm and positive opinion of the expert, Cheryl McGowan, that his ear had made the mark on the window, they naturally accepted its cogency. Thereafter they forcefully confronted Kempster with this result. He too, quite naturally, thought the evidence must be incontrovertible and, while maintaining his innocence, felt obliged to try and explain how his earprint could have got onto the window; his approach set the framework for his defence at the trial that followed. As a result, the earprint comparison was not seriously challenged, or examined in detail, beyond the production of a transparent earprint overlay by McGowan. This was a black-and-white outline of Kempster’s control print placed on top of the crime-scene mark, suggesting an exact match. Another expert approached by the defence agreed with Cheryl McGowan, but as the defence were mounting no challenge, he was not called to give evidence before the jury.
Kempster was convicted in March 2001 at Southampton Crown Court, and subsequently appealed on the basis that earprint evidence was not yet a fully fledged science, but his appeal failed despite some impressive international testimony. I became involved in 2007 when a second appeal was opened up by the diligence of my solicitor Steve Bird, who tracked down one of the few experts in this uncharted territory, Dr Michael Ingleby, whose experience with a European Union-funded research project in 2006 meant that he was able to highlight the need for minutiae to be identified before a firm opinion should be attempted.
This derived from yet more blind testing, where a known print was scanned with a databank of 7,580 samples from 1,229 donors in the UK, Holland and Italy. In 95 per cent of cases it came out in the top five of near-matches. This means that there are still at least four others with which the known print could be confused.
While preparing the second appeal it became clear to me that neither the prosecution nor the defence experts had satisfactorily explained how they had reached their conclusions. For example, Cheryl McGowan’s original trial statement merely said that she had made the comparison and had formed the view that the mark on the window was Kempster’s.
I asked Dr Ingleby to find out what original working notes or papers had been retained by the prosecution. It was dismaying in the extreme to find that in fact there was very little. It was at this point that Dr Ingleby discovered that the overlay used at trial was misleading. In 2008 he demonstrated to the Court of Appeal by the use of different colours on the overlay that the two sheets had not been properly aligned and therefore did not provide a match. There was, in his view, a mismatch of gross anatomical features as well as no comparable minutiae.
The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal on this point, but Kempster remained convicted on other counts.
What needs to happen in these cases is: first, the establishment of a consensus amongst the scientific community about what gross features and what minutiae are capable of providing a reliable comparison. Second, when a mark is lifted from the scene and sent to the laboratory, before any comparison is made a detailed analysis of the mark must be recorded, indicating what particular features are present. This record should include graphic, narrative and digitalised computer formats. Where possible these features should then be run through the databank to see if there are any comparators. When a suspect’s control print arrives at the laboratory, it should be examined quite separately, in the same way as the crime-scene mark. The final stage, I suggest, should be conducted by a senior expert who has not been previously involved. Then, and only then, should the critical comparison be made between the crime-scene mark, the control and any databank product.
This one simple, little-known case highlights the potential for fallibility and weakness in the science of identification. It also demonstrates how the course of justice can be diverted.
None of this is to say that the shortcomings of forensic science render it useless, or to undermine the enormous contribution it has made to the detection of crime. It is more a case of ensuring that a better recognition and accommodation of the risks attached to subjectivity do not irretrievably convert science into art.
* Staggeringly over thirty years later I am watching an episode of Wallander (BBC1, December 2008) starring the excellent Kenneth Branagh when a technical ‘nerd’ character does exactly the same thing – lifts a print with tape – for the purpose of accessing a locked computer.