In recent years, there have been a number of studies of the role of forensic evidence in wrongful convictions for a review. Many of these studies use data from exonerations, cases in which a conviction was overturned because of new evidence of innocence. Such studies use exoneration data or some other source of cases to generate a data set of cases in which a forensic discipline falsely incriminated the defendant. We have used this approach ourselves in a study of cases in which fingerprint errors contributed to wrongful convictions that later resulted in exoneration . Such studies exclude cases in which the forensic evidence was either: (1) not necessarily false; and/or (2) exculpated, rather than incriminated, innocent defendants. The approach of this study differs from all previous studies that use exoneration data to study forensic error, using fingerprint evidence as a convenient discipline on which to apply a broader approach.1 In this study, we examine all United States exoneration cases in which there was meaningful fingerprint evidence, regardless of whether it was erroneous and regardless of whether it incriminated the exoneree. This provides a broader look at the role of one forensic discipline in exoneration cases. Rather than asking how fingerprint error contributed to wrongful convictions, this study asks more broadly what role fingerprint evidence played in known exonerations. The answer is that it played a wide variety of roles, and in what follows, we try to make sense of them. (Excerpted from the Introduction.)
Cole et al. (Tue,) studied this question.