Com. v. Patterson
| Decision Date | 27 December 2005 |
| Citation | 445 Mass. 626,840 N.E.2d 12 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH v. Terry L. PATTERSON. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
John H. Cunha, Jr. (Helen Holcomb & Charles Allan Hope, Boston, with him) for the defendant.
Donna Jalbert Patalano, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth.
The following submitted briefs for amici curiae:
Robert C. Cosgrove, Assistant District Attorney, for District Attorney for the Berkshire District & others.
David M. Siegel, Stanley Z. Fisher, & Daniel Givelber for New England Innocence Project & others.
Lisa J. Steele, Bolton, for National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers & others.
LaDonna J. Hatton & Christopher Pohl, Special Assistant Attorneys General, for Secretary of Public Safety.
Present: MARSHALL, C.J., GREANEY, IRELAND, SPINA, COWIN, SOSMAN, & CORDY, JJ.
In 1995, Terry L. Patterson was convicted of the murder of a Boston police detective.1 His conviction was based in large part on the expert testimony of a member of the Boston police latent fingerprint section, who used the most common method of latent fingerprint identification, ACE-V,2 to determine that four latent impressions found on the victim's vehicle were left by Patterson. While no single latent impression, on its own, could reliably be matched to its allegedly corresponding finger, the fingerprint examiner based his testimony on the cumulative similarities observed between the impressions and their corresponding fingers. The examiner opined that the four impressions could be analyzed collectively because he believed them to be simultaneous impressions that is, impressions of multiple fingers made by the same hand at the same time.
After this court set aside Patterson's convictions on a ground not relevant to this appeal, see Commonwealth v. Patterson, 432 Mass. 767, 768, 739 N.E.2d 682 (2000), Patterson moved to exclude all fingerprint evidence from his retrial because, in his view, the Commonwealth's latent fingerprint identification evidence was unreliable and thus inadmissible under Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993) (Daubert), and Commonwealth v. Lanigan, 419 Mass. 15, 641 N.E.2d 1342 (1994) (Lanigan). After conducting an evidentiary hearing, a Superior Court judge denied Patterson's motion and reported the issue to the Appeals Court. We granted Patterson's application for direct appellate review to determine whether the judge abused her discretion in finding that the Commonwealth had established the reliability of its latent fingerprint identification evidence.
Consistent with the decisions of other courts that have considered the issue since Daubert, we conclude that the underlying theory and process of latent fingerprint identification, and the ACE-V method in particular, are sufficiently reliable to admit expert opinion testimony regarding the matching of a latent impression with a full fingerprint. In this case, however, the Commonwealth needed to establish more than the general reliability of latent fingerprint identification. It needed to establish that the theory, process, and method of latent fingerprint identification could be applied reliably to simultaneous impressions not capable of being individually matched to any of the fingers that supposedly made them. On the record before the judge below, the Commonwealth failed to meet its burden.3
1. Background. Before addressing the legal claims, we will briefly lay out the theory behind and modern application of latent fingerprint identification as well as the factual history of this case. We rely principally on the findings of fact made by the motion judge in connection with Patterson's motion to exclude the fingerprint evidence and on the transcript of the previous trial.
a. Latent fingerprint identification theory. Fingerprint evidence has been used extensively in criminal investigations and trials for more than one hundred years. Fingerprints are left by the deposit of oil on contact between a surface and the friction ridges of a finger. Latent fingerprints are fingerprint impressions that are not visible to the naked eye without chemical enhancement. These latent print impressions are almost always partial and may be distorted due to less than full, static contact with the object and to debris covering or altering the latent impression.
The theory behind latent fingerprint identification, called "individualization," is that a positive identification can result from the comparison of two fingerprints containing sufficient quality and quantity of detail. The underlying premise of this theory is the uniqueness and permanence of human friction ridge arrangements — that no two fingers, even on the same hand of the same person, contain the same ridge pattern. This uniqueness begins during prenatal development, when a template of the ridge patterns appears on the skin, and absent damage to the template, remains in the same exact form throughout one's life. A fingerprint should accordingly only match one finger of one person in the world.
b. The process of identification (ACE-V). The uniqueness of two full fingerprints does not, in and of itself, prove that one small portion of a fingerprint cannot mirror one portion of another fingerprint. And because latent print impressions left at crime scenes are often partial impressions of a full fingerprint, subject to significant distortions, it is a question of significant dispute as to how much detail in the latent print must be demonstrable to assert reliably its identity with a known fingerprint. Consequently, law enforcement and forensic scientists have endeavored to create and refine the method by which they identify the true "owner" of latent print impressions. A latent fingerprint impression lifted from a crime scene is compared to a full exemplar print taken from the suspect under controlled circumstances by dipping his finger in ink and slowly impressing his entire finger on a card in order to ensure full transcription of the finger. Matches of a latent print to a full print are made in several ways. A latent print can be processed through a computerized system that compares it to a rather large database of known full prints. Alternatively, a set of a suspect's fully inked fingerprints can be given to an examiner for comparison purposes. Either way, the fingerprint examiner ultimately compares the latent print to its potentially matching full print using a method known as ACE-V (analysis, comparison, evaluation, and verification).4
In the analysis stage of ACE-V, the examiner looks at the first of three levels of detail ("level one") on the latent print. Level one detail involves the general ridge flow of a fingerprint, that is, the pattern of loops, arches, and whorls visible to the naked eye. The examiner compares this information to the exemplar print in an attempt to exclude a print that has very clear dissimilarities. At this stage, the examiner also looks for focal points — or points of interest — on the latent print that could help prove or disprove a match. Such focal points are often at the boundaries between different ridges in the print. The examiner will then collect level two and level three detail information about the focal points he has observed. Level two details include ridge characteristics (or Galton Points) like islands, dots, and forks, formed as the ridges begin, end, join or bifurcate. Level three details involve microscopic ridge attributes such as the width of a ridge, the shape of its edge, or the presence of a sweat pore near a particular ridge.
In the comparison stage, the examiner compares the level one, two, and three details of the focal points found on the latent print with the full print, paying attention to each characteristic's location, type, direction, and relationship to one another. The comparison step is a somewhat objective process, as the examiner simply adds up and records the quantity and quality of similarities he sees between the prints. In the evaluation stage, by contrast the examiner relies on his subjective judgment to determine whether the quality and quantity of those similarities are sufficient to make an identification, an exclusion, or neither.
While some jurisdictions require (or used to require) a minimum number of Galton point similarities to declare an individual match between a latent and full print, most agencies in the United States no longer mandate any specific number.5 Rather, the examiner uses his expertise, experience, and training to make a final determination. There is a rule of examination, the "one-discrepancy" rule, that provides that a nonidentification finding should be made if a single discrepancy exists. However, the examiner has the discretion to ignore a possible discrepancy if he concludes, based on his experience and the application of various factors, that the discrepancy might have been caused by distortions of the fingerprint at the time it was made or at the time it was collected.
Assuming a positive identification is made by the first examiner, the verification step of the process involves a second examiner, who knows that a preliminary match has been made and who knows the identity of the suspect, repeating the first three steps of the process.
c. Simultaneous impressions. The ACE-V method is usually employed to match one latent fingerprint impression to one fully inked fingerprint. Often, however, a person leaves latent impressions of multiple fingers on objects that he touches. Such fingerprint impressions left by the same person at the same time are referred to as simultaneous impressions. A difficulty arises when no single latent impression in the cluster of simultaneous impressions has a sufficient quantity or quality of similar detail to be matched reliably to a single fully inked fingerprint using the ACE-V approach. In such cases,...
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