Evidential Value Of Fingerprints Essay

Part B: The evidential value of fingerprints within a Legal Context

When it comes to criminal investigations, fingerprints are of extreme evidentiary value. When one asks what evidential value is, it is considered to be as what can be achieved with the collected evidence in a forensic laboratory and later which is presented in court. When it comes to evidential value of fingerprints within a legal context, in court, the presence or absence of information about the context in which the evidence is found in, can affect the value of the evidence itself.

Sir Galton, as previously discussed in the history section, defined three basic principles when he studied the uniqueness and the individuality of friction skin ridges. These principles are:

• Fingerprints

Carroll Bonnet who was 61 years old, who was living alone in Nebraska, Omaha, in an apartment was found stabbed on 17 October 1978 after same person failed to report for work for the second day in a row.

The crime scene investigators photographed the murder scene and elevated all evidence found in the apartment. Along finding items such as: severed telephone cord, newspapers on the coffee table and floor, beer cans taken from the trash and towels near the victim amongst other items, they found a note written by the killer himself stating that he had left one piece of evidence at the crime scene. The victim’s car was then stolen.

On the items elevated, latent fingerprints were found on the medicine cabinet, the beer cans, the telephone and even on the bathroom door. Two days later on 19th October 1978, the victim’s car was found abandoned in Illinois. When the Illinois police collected the evidence including cigarette butts and additional fingerprints, they found that only two from those prints were identifiable, with one of them belonging to the deceased person himself whilst the other fingerprint remained