Pointing the finger

In his continuing series, James Morton delves into the murky world of fingerprint evidence and DNA

Hands up those of us who over the years bowed the knee or head and gave up when an expert witness said that he had found our client's fingerprints on the bank safe.

Fourteen matching points and an expert witness with ten years' experience (never less) was quite sufficient to send us running for the cover of the highly illegal sentence bargain.

Unless, that is, the client had an account at the bank and that previous week had been invited to a select sherry party in the vault given by the manager.

And no, he didn't want him called.

Now, after all these years, fingerprint evidence and it's granddaughter, DNA, are coming under renewed scrutiny.

There is an article by Michael Specter 'Do Fingerprints Lie?' in The New Yorker (27 May).

It centres on the Scottish case of policewoman Shirley McKie whose print was apparently found in a room where the murder took place.

She said she had not been there and was prosecuted for perjury.

Fortunately, a senior New Scotland Yard scientist was convinced it was not her print.

'It wasn't even a close call', he said, and she was vindicated.

In January of this year, a US District Court judge limited the use of fingerprint evidence in a Philadelphia murder case.

He noted the 'alarmingly high' error rates on periodic proficiency exams.

Then in April, in Australia, a question arose over the DNA evidence in the case of Joy Thomas, who in her heyday had been a close friend of some members of what was known as the East Coast Mafia.

Now she was up on trial for blackmail.

DNA tests had allegedly shown that she had licked the envelopes of extortion letters which had temporarily caused the removal of Arnott's biscuits from the shelves, causing a $10 million loss.

Hers had been a colourful life.

She had been born into a boxing family and had been a showgirl.

In 1968, she was sentenced along with her then husband, her son Ronald and another man after a bungled robbery at a Newtown postal depot in which a security guard had died.

She was released on parole in the late 1970s and, when Ronnie escaped from Milson Island prison, she was charged with harbouring him.

Her cause was taken up by a group complaining that a mother should not be imprisoned for helping her son and she was freed on appeal.

Then in 1991, Ronnie was again convicted, this time of the murder of the Gold Coast bookmaker Peter Wade and his girlfriend Maureen Ambrose, shot allegedly by him and another man in Wade's flat in Surfer's Paradise.

In 1997, poisoned packets of biscuits and some letters turned up at the offices of a Queensland newspaper, as well as that of the Queensland Attorney-General and the Criminal Justice Commission.

It was the envelopes that Joy Thomas was accused of licking.

They claimed that Ronald Thomas was innocent and demanded that the case be reviewed.

The sender wanted the police officers involved to take lie detector tests.

It all turned out well for her when on 26 April, now aged 72, she walked free.

The Crown Prosecutor offered no evidence once a forensic biologist, who had matched a DNA sample, after examining test results from the defence accepted there might be a second profile.

The moral? As my school reports used to say: never give up in the face of difficulty.

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Who says that art does not imitate life - or is it the other way around? At present, there is a highly entertaining French film, 'Read My Lips', doing the rounds of the art houses.

A young, deaf and put-upon secretary hires a recently released burglar as her assistant in a building firm.

By turns, he employs her to read the lips of the boss of the nightclub where he is moonlighting and who is planning a major robbery.

Now watch on.

At the beginning of the month, Shoreham solicitor, Martin Moore received a 45-month sentence.

The police had hired a lip-reading expert to interpret tapes of Moore talking to his client and agreeing to bring drugs into his cell before a court appearance at Haywards Heath Magistrates' Court.

Now serve on.

James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist