Fingerprints are directly-recorded facts. What may be junk science is what expert witnesses present about the interpretation of fingerprints.
> The problem is that many juries, judges, prosecutors, and even defenders forget about this.
Juries as triers of fact, and judges insofar as they are ruling on the facts of the case, aren't, in any case, supposed to allow themselves fo be guided by extrinsic knowledge, they are supposed to act based on facts (both direct and the expert knowledge relating to the import of direct facts) provided as evidence, both testimony and exhibits, in the case.
That's not really how it works; false positives exist, especially if you consider that a lot of times you have incomplete or smudged fingerprints and there is actually some amount of subjectivity involved in determining a match. See e.g. [1]: "only two properly designed studies of latent fingerprint analysis had been conducted. These both found the rate of false matches (known as “false positives”) to be very high: 1 in 18 and 1 in 30."
Again: useful evidence for sure, but considering them undisputable facts is not wise.
Matches (positive or negative) are not the same thing as fingerprints. Fingerprints are directly recorded facts. Matches are matters of interpretation (the fact of a match reported by a particular system is a distinct direct fact from the fingerprint itself, but again the significance is...what expert testimony exists to establish or challenge.)
The reality is that when "fingerprint evidence" is brought to court that it's not foolproof and has a sizeable margin of error that should be accounted for when considering the verdict, something that is currently often ignored. You can argue semantics all day, but that's the way things work right now. This seems like an exceedingly pedantic point to make.
> The reality is that when "fingerprint evidence" is brought to court that it's not foolproof
No evidence is foolproof. My entire point is that the issue isn't with “fingerprints” or the knowledge that juries and judges bring extrinsically (which was the explicit claim made upthread), but with the expert testimony that contextualizes fingerprints.
(This was even more clearly the problem with fiber evidence when the FBI crime lab was presenting pure bunk expert testimony in virtually every case.)
Fingerprints are directly-recorded facts. What may be junk science is what expert witnesses present about the interpretation of fingerprints.
> The problem is that many juries, judges, prosecutors, and even defenders forget about this.
Juries as triers of fact, and judges insofar as they are ruling on the facts of the case, aren't, in any case, supposed to allow themselves fo be guided by extrinsic knowledge, they are supposed to act based on facts (both direct and the expert knowledge relating to the import of direct facts) provided as evidence, both testimony and exhibits, in the case.