In detective novels and television series, criminals often get caught because they leave fingerprints at the scene. Well, art does imitate life; fingerprint analysis is widely used in U.S. courts and those of many other countries. But last year a funny thing happened to fingerprint evidence on the way to a conviction. Applying the standard set for the admissibility of scientific evidence by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1993 Daubert case, Judge Louis Pollak ruled that an expert could not testify that the prints at a crime scene matched those of a suspect. Shock reverberated through the criminal justice community, until Judge Pollak induced a sigh of relief from district attorneys everywhere by saying that at least in this case, such testimony could be used after all.
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Donald Kennedy (2003) studied this question.