From Lawrie O'Connor
I normally have a fair amount of time for Tam Dalyell, but he took a very
firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick on fingerprinting
(Westminster Diary, 1 September, p 53).
Yes, fingerprints are “reliable” as he said—80 per cent
of the time. He acknowledges that this is a 20 per cent failure rate, but then
looks only at one side of the problem.
Fingerprints cannot be used to prove that someone is innocent. A fingerprint,
if it’s a good one, may prove that I, you or Tam Dalyell was at the scene of a
crime. Fingerprints can’t prove when we were there, and they certainly can’t
prove that we were not there, or that we were somewhere else. A smudged print,
on the other hand, if it’s among the 20 per cent of wrongly identified prints,
could be used to convict an innocent party.
Ossett, West Yorkshire
