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Criminals convicted primarily on the basis of fingerprint evidence could soon have grounds for appeal based on the comments of a leading forensic scientist.Fingerprint evidence has been employed to establish criminal involvement since forensic science was first used by the UK’s Scotland Yard back in 1901, but now Mike Silverman, who introduced the first automated fingerprint detection system to the Metropolitan Police, believes that this method of establishing guilt is not as reliable as previously thought.
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We’re relying more and more on DNA evidence to catch rapists and murderers, but there’s evidence that psychological bias plays a part in how this evidence is interpreted. Labs aren’t always as objective as we’d like them to be.

Recently, we’ve seen cases where DNA evidence freed innocent people from prisons, but sometimes, contaminated DNA evidence causes police to create a perpetrator in their minds who doesn’t really exist. This happened in Germany in 2007, when some contaminated swabs caused them to search for–as Vaughan Bell writes in the Observer–an "invincible, transsexual, border-hopping serial killer just to keep the story coherent with the genetic evidence."
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On TV shows like CSI, forensic scientists identify crooks by the evidence they leave behind, and the best kind of evidence is fingerprints. But Tsutomu Matsumoto of the University of Yokohama in Japan has discovered that fake fingers made out of jello can leave prints that fool the experts.

His team created artificial fingers out of gelatin and used them with security systems that rely on a fingerprint for ID. They also used the jello fingers to leave fake fingerprints on a glass. This means a burglar could not only wipe off his own prints, he could leave fake ones around to fool the cops. He could even use the prints of one of his worst enemies to send the police down a false trail.
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