Only some kinds of mistakes were made

I probably shouldn’t be, but I was amused by this Chron story about the current state of the HPD fingerprint lab and the consultants who audited it.

[HPD Assistant Chief Timothy] Oettmeier said consultants also had performed more in-depth technical audits of a random selection of 548 completed criminal cases. No misidentifications were found, he said, but consultants did detect technical errors in 53 percent of those cases. He defined those errors as cases in which HPD examiners had failed to find fingerprints on a piece of evidence or found a print but mistakenly said it was not sufficient for an identification.

“The good thing about that audit is there were no erroneous identifications,” Oettmeier said. “That means we did not find any instance where a person was put in jail or prison because of a mistake made in a fingerprint.”

Troy McKinney, past president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyer’s Association, said it was “almost statistically impossible” for the lab to have such a high rate of technical errors and not have made any false identifications.

“Having 62 percent of cases having problem with methodology of the analysis is an indication there are fundamental flaws in that lab,” McKinney said. “I always worry that somebody may have been mistakenly identified. It’s not just about the results, it’s about the process. And merely because somebody thinks now the results are reliable, is not an indication it was reliable when it was done and a jury should have relied on it at the time.”

Apparently, the fingerprint lab’s problem is that they’re just too cautious. You don’t see that every day. Let’s just say I can understand McKinney’s skepticism.

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