Vidocq's Fingerprint
The Washington Examiner reports about efforts to strengthen Maryland’s Capital Punishment Laws. “Maryland lawmakers and the state attorney general are bucking calls to repeal the death penalty with a bill that would expand the types of evidence admissible in capital cases.
Sen. Norman R. Stone Jr., D-Baltimore County, is sponsoring a bill that would enable courts to use fingerprints and photographs to convict suspects of capital murder.
Taking a DNA swap
The bill rebuffs the legislature’s highly publicized vote last year to limit admissible evidence in capital cases to “biological” or “DNA” samples, a video recording of the suspect committing the crime or a recording of the suspect’s voluntary confession. But fingerprint evidence is subjective, and “comparing curls and swirls to see if they match” easily could send an innocent man to death row, said Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions.
“There is a huge amount of ignorance in Annapolis,” she said. “Does Annapolis have its head buried so deep in the sand to think that fingerprints — just because we’ve used them for 100 years — are reliable?”
Experts on fingerprint analysis are scheduled to testify before the Judicial Proceedings Committee Wednesday.
Sen. J. Lowell Stoltzfus, R-Worcester County, said the fingerprint clause clarifies — rather than diverges from — last year’s decision to tighten evidence standards. He said “biological standards” infers the use of fingerprints. Stone defended fingerprints as “valuable evidence in every type of crime.” [Prosecutors] use fingerprints all the time,” he said.
Read the entire article from the Washington Examiner here.
