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Attorneys challenge fingerprint evidence (This article is reprinted from the September 2, 2000 issue of The Seattle Times)
By STEVE MILETICH Federal public defenders representing terrorism suspect Ahmed Ressam want a federal judge to re-examine the admissibility of fingerprint evidence - evidence accepted in U.S. courts for nearly a century. Ressam's fingerprints were found on timing devices seized from the trunk of a rental car he was driving when arrested in Port Angeles in December, according to the FBI. The trunk also contained powerful explosives, investigators said. Ressam's car was searched by U.S. Customs inspectors after he arrived aboard a ferry from Victoria, B.C. Federal officials say Ressam's arrest helped them break up a terrorist plot to set off bombs during the New Year's Eve millennium celebration. Seattle, New York and Washington, D.C., were identified as a possible targets. The prints give federal prosecutors evidence to counter a potential claim by Ressam that he didn't know what was in the trunk. But Ressam's attorneys argue in their request that fingerprint identification has never been scientifically proved. “Latent fingerprint examiners have been testifiying as experts in this country since the beginning of the 20th Century,” the attorneys said in a motion filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Seattle. “But the trial court judges that initially permitted latent fingerprint examiners to testify did not act as the 'gatekeepers' ” envisioned under current legal standards, they said. Unlike DNA evidence, they said, no testing has been done to support the premise that no two people can share the same fingerprint. There also has been no testing to support the conclusion that examiners can reliably identify prints that “invariably have some unknown degree of distortion and variability from the actual fingerprint of the person who left the latent print,” the attorneys said. Their motion, which will be reviewed by U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, faces a high hurdle. Fingerprints were first accepted by an English court in 1902 and were admitted for the first time in the U.S. in a 1911 case in Illinois. Ressam, an Algerian national who had been living in Montreal, was indicted earlier this year on nine criminal charges, including one count accusing him of conspiring to commit a terrorist act at an unspecified site in the U.S. Also see Fingerprint evidence allowed in bomb trial.
This article was printed in “THE PRINT” |