feeling listless

Law With the move into DNA as permissable evidence in court it seems only natural that older forms of 'proof' would fall out of favour. No one will have expected, however, that fingerprinting would become so unsound this quickly. The Economist reports that a judge in Philadelphia has ruled that DNA will no longer allowing finger-printing experts into a courtroom unless the prosecutor has enough other evidence to offer an acceptable arguement. I'm not a lawyer (yet another group I'm not part of), but I would have thought this ruling could be admissable in a number of miscarriages of justice, especially in the US where "declaring a match between two prints generally requires a certain number of points of similarity between them. Different jurisdictions set varying standards for how many similar points are required, which makes this standard seem arbitrary. Even worse, in some jurisdictions declaring a match requires only an overall “impression” of similarity on the part of an expert."