Transcript History Lab S3 Ep4: A close match
Brandon Mayfield: [00:00:01] I saw a whole army of agents coming in with their briefcase, had their gloves on, searching my office, and what the government was asserting was that they had matched my non-French. One of the latent prints was found on a bag of detonators and they were asserting that it was a 100 percent match.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:00:19] Welcome to History Lab. I’m your host, Tamson Pietsch. And today on our final episode for the season, we look at forensic science with forensic science.
Claude Roux: [00:00:28] Essentially, we are expert of traces and by traces I mean remnant relics of some activities and presence of people or objects.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:00:38] And it’s clash with the laws, demand for certainty.
James Robertson: [00:00:41] There have been major reports from the United States in particular. But if you believed everything that was then you would say the forensic science was not very reliable at all.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:00:52] And we explore how forensic science has come to know us through the traces we leave behind.
Claude Roux: [00:00:58] We have to deal with a lot of uncertainties in forensic science. So the idea that it’s absolute and it’s a universal truth. It’s a misconception of forensic science. Forensic science is a lot of shades of grey.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:01:09] This sounds a lot like history to me.
Sarah Mashman: [00:01:12] All right. So I’ll just get you to start by introducing yourself.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:01:14] That’s History lab producer Sarah Mashman.
Claude Roux: [00:01:16] So my name is Claude Roux, Professor of Forensic Science. Sarah, I should start again because I don’t necessary like the big titles. But if I want to be accurate, I should say I’m a Distinguished Professor. Forensic Science.
Sarah Mashman: [00:01:28] You can tell he doesn’t like to brag, but Claude’s worked* with the U.S. Secret Service, the Canadian Mounties, U.K. Home Office and the Australian Federal Police on cases around the world. The stakes are high in his line of work.
Claude Roux: [00:01:43] So my original specialty in forensic science is trace evidence. Forensic science is the study of traces. And traces are these remnants of people or activities that are linked to event under investigation. So these traces are proxies of something that happened.
Sarah Mashman: [00:02:04] And Claude’s job is to make these traces talk.
Claude Roux: [00:02:08] Essentially, these silent witnesses, as we call them, that we like to make them speak. It could be little fragments of glass of paints or fibres and hairs and all sorts of things. But also over the years, I’ve also done a lot of research in fingerprint detection. I guess in the last 10 years I’ve become more and more interested in philosophies of forensic science.
Sarah Mashman: [00:02:30] The history of modern forensic science starts with the French criminologist** known as the Sherlock Holmes of France.
Claude Roux: [00:02:37] I think there is no doubt that a big inspiration comes from Edmond Locard.
Sarah Mashman: [00:02:41] Edmond Locard was a pioneer in forensic science and he developed a theory.
Claude Roux: [00:02:50] When there is someone doing some activity, that person take some traces from the place and at the same time would leave some traces of him or her, and his or her. And that’s pretty much the premises of what we loosely call Locard’s Exchange Principles. Every contact leaves a trace. (In French) Chaque contact laisse une trace.
Sarah Mashman: [00:03:12] So every contact leaves a trace. And science has the job to interpret and make those traces speak.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:03:19] But what happens when law demands an answer that science can’t give?
Sarah Mashman: [00:03:23] On the morning of March 11, 10 bombs exploded on four trains.
Claude Roux: [00:03:28] It was a major terrorist attack on a commuter train in Madrid in 2004.
Sarah Mashman: [00:03:33] 191 people were killed and over fifteen hundred wounded. It was catastrophic.
Claude Roux: [00:03:39] It’s a major case and it’s literally chaos. But the chaos has to be organised the best we can. So obviously there is a first respondent approach. But then it’s a major crime scene. So the first thing to see once the scene has been secured and is not dangerous is really trying to understand what happened. And as soon as you have the hypothesis of a terrorist case, then you’ve got the question about: how that happened, whether it was an explosive, what type of explosives, what type of traces we can find.
Sarah Mashman: [00:04:11] The Spanish authorities found an abandoned set of detonator caps inside a plastic bag a few blocks away from one of the bomb sites.
Claude Roux: [00:04:20] The evidence was a plastic bag of detonators. That material was submitted to various forensic processes and a finger mark was detected on that plastic bag.
Sarah Mashman: [00:04:29] This was the trace. It drew the interest of the FBI who matched it to a man living 9000 kilometers away.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:04:37] What?
Sarah Mashman: [00:04:38] Let me explain. How’s the weather in Oregon today?
Brandon Mayfield: [00:04:41] I haven’t gone out today, but this side of the cascade, it’s usually raining and overcast almost all winter.
Sarah Mashman: [00:04:47] I called Brandon Mayfield. He’s a defence lawyer working in the U.S..
Brandon Mayfield: [00:04:51] I remember the Madrid bombing. That was Spain’s version of our September 11th. And I remember telling my wife, you know, I don’t know who did this attack, but I thought they were criminals of the worst sort.
Sarah Mashman: [00:05:02] Almost two months after the Madrid attack, Brandon was working in his office.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:05:07] And I got an unexpected knock on the door. I saw a male and female. They were dressed in black. At first I thought they were Jehovah’s Witness or Mormons. I didn’t know, but I was ready to send them on their way. Say thanks, but no thanks. But they identified that they were FBI agents and they said they had a warrant for an arrest.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:05:24] They handcuffed me and then they put the warrant for my arrest on the desk in front of me. They were standing there with their weapons drawn, but at their side. And I started reading items that they were apparently searching for, which included blasting caps, fuses. But for me, it was more important to just find out who authorised this search and arrest. So I quickly went to the bottom line and saw that it was authorised by local federal district court judge here in Oregon, Judge Jones. At that point, I said, OK, let’s go see Judge Jones thinking that there was clearly a mistake and that it would be quickly resolved.
Sarah Mashman: [00:06:01] Brandon hadn’t met Judge Jones before, but as a lawyer, he thought that if he just told the judge, he could sort it out.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:06:08] But that’s not how things happen. I was placed in leg shackles. I was cuffed with belly chains, placed by myself in an empty cell. And it was there for the first time that I was able to understand what was going on. And what the government was asserting was that they had matched my known print to one of the latest prints that was found on a bag of detonators and they were asserting that it was a 100 percent match.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:06:31] A 100 percent match? That sounds pretty definitive to me. But how did the FBI get hold of Brendan’s prints?
Sarah Mashman: [00:06:39] Two sets of Brandon’s prints were in their system, one from when he was a teenager. He’d been arrested for burglary of the vehicle. But those charges were dropped. And he’d also served in the U.S. Army who fingerprint new recruits when they start.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:06:53] So the U.S. state takes identification pretty seriously.
Sarah Mashman: [00:06:58] They do. And I mean, they have my fingerprints on file.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:07:02] Do I really want to ask?
Sarah Mashman: [00:07:04] Nothing dodgy. It’s standard when you go through immigration in the U.S.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:07:08] Oh, gosh. That means they’ve got mine, too.
Sarah Mashman: [00:07:10] Yeah. Well, they get all 10 digits and a facial scan. And look, I’m not planning on robbing a bank, but having left these traces of myself in another system. It made me wonder how international law enforcement works. Claude said it’s standard procedure to share this kind of information.
Claude Roux: [00:07:27] In major cases like that you would have international searches. So you would have the fingermark that was detected by the Spanish police. The image of that fingermark would have been distributed through police channels and every police force in most countries would have run their databases.
Sarah Mashman: [00:07:49] Back in Oregon, Brandon kept pushing to see Judge Jones. It was obvious to him that he was either being framed or it was a misunderstanding.And he had an idea why.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:07:59] I wasn’t surprised because as a Muslim attorney at that particular time, I was seeing and hearing about a high incidence of targeting and profiling of Muslims across the U.S..
Tamson Pietsch : [00:08:10] Okay, so what’s actually going on here?
Sarah Mashman: [00:08:14] Let’s put this in context. It was almost three years after 9/11 happened. America was at war with Iraq. They had invaded Afghanistan and racial profiling was rife.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:08:25] So Brendan was arrested. But was he actually charged?
Sarah Mashman: [00:08:29] He wasn’t. He was being detained as a ‘material witness’. Confused? So was Brandon. But finally, he went before Judge Jones. He was the judge, who’d issued the original warrant for his arrest.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:08:43] I know it was not wise to make a statement, considering the gravity of the situation. But I said to him, I said, ‘Your Honor. That’s not my print. If it is, I have no idea how it got there’. And then after reflecting against again said, ‘Your Honor. Definitively. That’s not my print’. You know, his reaction was essentially, ‘well here we have an assertion that this is my print by the government. A hundred percent identification. And we’ve convicted people on murder with little more than a print.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:09:08] Right away, I just felt like the walls of injustice closing in quickly around me. I was strip searched. I was stripped of my dignity. I was humiliated. I felt crushed and overwhelmed by the absurdity and the hopelessness of this entire situation.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:09:24] Beside the fingerprint assertions in that affidavit that’s made by a sworn officer, every other justification from my arrest had to do with the fact that I was Muslim. I was married to Mona Mohammed. She was an Egyptian, a nationalised citizen. I represented Muslim clients and they even noted that I was seeing going to and from a local mosque. I was treated like a common criminal, but even worse, I mean, actually like a terrorist.
Sarah Mashman: [00:09:49] The FBI were building a case against Brandon, but they denied that the primary reason for the investigation was because of his religion.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:09:57] I have a question. The FBI connected Brandon, who was from Oregon, to a fingerprint on a bag in Spain. Had he been travelling?
Sarah Mashman: [00:10:08] He says he hadn’t. And the FBI had checked the national tracking system. It did not show any airline travel or border crossings in Brandon’s name.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:10:18] I don’t think I’d been out of the country for a year.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:10:21] I mean, none of this makes sense. If Brandon hadn’t gone to Spain, how did they even find a trace of him there?
Brandon Mayfield: [00:10:27] The way that they spun it was that that was proof that I must have traveled on false documents.
Sarah Mashman: [00:10:31] And remember, at this point, the entire forensic case against Brandon hung on one incomplete fingerprint.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:10:38] So how are they so sure it was Brandon’s?
Sarah Mashman: [00:10:40] The FBI ran the partial print through their databases and compared it to millions of others. This automated search produced a list of 20 candidate prints, but Brandon’s wasn’t the number one match.
Claude Roux: [00:10:53] It’s not uncommon that in the end, the correct fingerprint is not number one. It’s quite often in the top, but it’s really not uncommon not being number one or two.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:11:02] So the tech can’t give an answer by itself.
Sarah Mashman: [00:11:05] That’s when the FBI examiners step in. They manually analyse the print.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:11:10] What does that look like?
Sarah Mashman: [00:11:11] Well, an FBI examiner does side by side comparison of the 20 potential matches. They look for what’s similar and what’s different. In this [00:11:20] case, the [00:11:21] examiner concluded it was Brandon’s print. He showed it to his colleague who agreed and so did their boss.
Claude Roux: [00:11:28] So right from the start, there is a lot of decision making that has to be done. And the result has to be interpreted. And I think many people haven’t understood over the years, they always thought that finger mark was evidence or fact. But the reality, it’s not finger mark. It’s like any other trace. It has to be interpreted in a context.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:11:50] Interpreted in context. So Claude basically is a historian.
Sarah Mashman: [00:11:54] As a forensic scientist, he might disagree.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:11:57] Okay. Okay. So at this point, there were three guys at the FBI who had agreed the print was Brandon’s. Have you actually seen the print?
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:04] Yeah, I can show you. I can look it up online.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:12:06] Really? What do you even search for?
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:09] FBI, Brandon Mayfield.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:12:11] And it just comes up?
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:11] It’s on page 56, but the documents like 330 pages long and most of its redacted.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:12:18] Yeah. I can see the black patches. Okay. So this is it.
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:22] Yeah. This is the print that was found on the plastic bag. I don’t know what you make of that?
Tamson Pietsch : [00:12:28] It’s pretty indistinct. Like you can sort of see the loops and the whirls, but it’s really obscured by these black patches.
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:35] If you compare it to your own fingers, you can see similarities. But really to me, this this just looks like a very bad line drawing.
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:45] Clearly, we are both confused.
Claude Roux: [00:12:47] So I think you should talk to the fingerprint experts.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:12:53] Hang on. Isn’t Claude the fingerprint expert?
Sarah Mashman: [00:12:55] Claude’s a forensic scientist, but his job isn’t to interpret fingerprints. That’s the job of specialists at the Australian Federal Police.
Bruce Comber: [00:13:05] Dactyloscopy is an old European term that looked at people that studied the skin of the fingers. Is it is a word that we are familiar with, but we don’t use it. We prefer to call ourselves fingerprint examiners.
Sarah Mashman: [00:13:16] That’s Bruce Comber. He’s been working this field for 20 years.
Rebecca Lee: [00:13:19] In terms of parts of a fingerprint, we look at areas such as the delta, which makes a little triangle section. The core, which is sort of the centre of fingerprint pattern. And then we also look at the individual characteristics, which we call minutia.
Sarah Mashman: [00:13:36] And that’s Rebecca Lee. She joined the team three years ago.
Rebecca Lee: [00:13:40] The time it takes to do a fingerprint identification is very dependent on a lot of different factors. So the first thing would be to look at the quality of that fingerprint. A poor quality fingerprint can be very, very difficult to compare. If we have a person of interest, we can do the manual comparisons to that straight away. And if it does identify that person, then that’s quicker than having to run it through our system. But I have also spent several hours looking at one fingerprint, trying to convince myself one way or the other and get to the point where I’m confident in the decision that I’m making.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:14:15] I know that feeling. I’ve done that in the archive.
Sarah Mashman: [00:14:18] Well, it looks like it happens in labs, too. In 2001, a new automated fingerprinting system was introduced. It made it faster to both capture and analyse prints.
Bruce Comber: [00:14:29] When I first started in fingerprints, we would get a stack of fingerprint forms from the criminal records office that were taken overnight and we would manually compare them with what was on file or what was in the database. Now, with the technology, we have what’s called a live scan unit, which is an optical block that you can roll your fingers on and that creates an electronic image. The turnaround time on that is something in the vicinity of minutes.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:14:54] Okay. So is this the system they used in? Brandon Mayfield’s case.
Sarah Mashman: [00:14:58] Exactly. It was pretty rigorous. To start with the system search the database resulting in those 20 potential candidate prints. And then three FBI examiners spent three whole days comparing Brandon’s fingerprint. And then an independent examiner came to the same conclusion. It was Brandon’s print.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:15:17] It’s not looking very good for Brandon.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:15:23] I was supposed to have been given an opportunity to see my wife for the first time, and so I was waiting and waiting there for Mona to show up. But instead, after an indefinite wait, I was greeted by my attorneys who said they’d just talked to the US attorney’s office and the government intended to file for my release. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:15:42] They went on to explain that the government had just been informed by the Spanish police that they had only identified the print on the bag had belonged to a Spanish Algerian national named Daoud Ouhane. That’s when I found out there was somebody else who now they were alleging had left the fingerprints on the bag of detonators.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:16:00] What?
Sarah Mashman: [00:16:01] Yeah. So it turns out that the Spanish police had always had their doubts. They’d compared Brandon’s prints back in April, and back then they decided that the trace was not his. With Daoud arrested, Brandon was free.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:16:17] Wow. Yeah. Just thinking about it again. You know, I’m almost moved to tears again. I was happy. There was tears in my eyes. It was like vindication. I looked at my attorney and I just smiled. It was almost like that smile, like, see, I told you so. It wasn’t me. That was my fingerprint.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:16:36] How could forensic science get it so wrong? I mean, in history we ask questions of traces from the past. And sometimes the conclusions we come to are uncertain. But historians acknowledge that as part of how they know. What’s surprising me…and I’m hearing that Claude’s description of forensic science seems to work in a similar way.
Claude Roux: [00:16:58] How is it possible that people could make that mistake? How is it possible that forensic science and especially fingerprint evidence is not absolute? We have to deal with a lot of uncertainties in forensic science.
Sarah Mashman: [00:17:10] The first uncertainty for Brandon…
Claude Roux: [00:17:12] Actually Daoud’s fingerprint and Mayfield’s fingerprints are different, but very close. So it’s what we call it, close non match.
Sarah Mashman: [00:17:22] It’s exactly how it sounds. It’s not a match, but it’s a close one. And you could be confused if the quality of the mark isn’t there. And that’s our second uncertainty.
Claude Roux: [00:17:32] The mark was not pristine. So obviously we don’t have necessarily all the information we would like to see in that.
Sarah Mashman: [00:17:39] The third uncertainty is the size of the dataset. The FBI was searching a database of millions of prints.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:17:46] You’d think that would be a good thing.
Sarah Mashman: [00:17:48] Yeah, but it raises some problems.
Claude Roux: [00:17:51] So you had some kind of a statistical factor that came into play because you have a lot of close non matches when you have a so large database.
Sarah Mashman: [00:17:58] And then, of course, there’s the human factor.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:18:02] Ah, the beautiful uncertainty.
Claude Roux: [00:18:04] The process relies a lot on the expertise of the fingerprint examiner. I think we shouldn’t hide that. The examiners knew the conclusions reached by the first examiner. So there was some kind of confirmation bias. I think the question of fingerprints, especially in terms of how reliable it is you know in many cases they are not necessarily the magic bullet. They have to be interpreted in the context of the case. They have to be interpreted in the context of how well they are able to answer the questions that have been asked. And I think that’s very important to remember that any forensic method or forensic trace is really only as good as it assists us answering the questions being asked.
Sarah Mashman: [00:18:48] Our fingerprints have formed a key part in the way that the law tries to understand us. They considered something of a personal seal.
Tamson Pietsch: [00:18:55] So when did fingerprints first appear in Australian courtrooms?
Sarah Mashman: [00:18:59] Well, they’ve had a long history of use as an identification system, especially for groups subject to state control, like Aboriginal people, immigrants and criminals.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:19:10] Australia’s got a long record of incarcerating those groups.
Claude Roux: [00:19:13] Australia has been an early adopter for fingerprint to solve criminal cases and the first case was in 1983.
Nerida Campbell: [00:19:28] I’ve never seen a ghost here. The building’s made of sandstone, so it’s always a little bit chillier than outside.
Sarah Mashman: [00:19:34] Nerida Campbell is a curator at the Justice and Police Museum in Central Sydney. She’s spent some time looking into the man who is in charge of Australia’s first fingerprinting bureau.
Nerida Campbell: [00:19:47] Walter Henry Charles. He was particularly interested in new science and technology and how it could be used to make police officers better at their jobs and to make their jobs easier. And he seems to have been a remarkably curious person. He was apparently also quite a bon vivant. That’s how he was described in the papers at the time. Police were quick to embrace fingerprinting. It was a tool that they could see would make their jobs easier.
Sarah Mashman: [00:20:14] The police was sold on this new technique as a game changer.
Nerida Campbell: [00:20:18] Some criminals would actually plead guilty in the face of fingerprinting evidence before it was even used against them in a court because they felt that it was such a strong evidence evidentiary tool.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:20:29] Okay, so the police and criminals were convinced. But what about the courts?
Nerida Campbell: [00:20:34] When fingerprinting was first introduced, there were some challenges in the courts because they weren’t quite sure about how fingerprinting evidence fitted into the traditional forms of evidence. There was a famous case in 1912 in Melbourne. A thief broke into a jewellers’.
Sarah Mashman: [00:20:51] The thief robbed a safe, and he might have got away with it. But he got thirsty and drank a bottle of ginger beer, which he left at the scene of the crime. On this bottle with three fingerprints. Two were unusable, but one was good,.
Nerida Campbell: [00:21:05] And the Victorian police were able to link that fingerprint to a suspect.
Sarah Mashman: [00:21:09] They arrested a man called Ed Parker. And what’s remarkable about this case was it was the first time in Australia that someone was convicted with a fingerprint serving as the sole piece of evidence.
Nerida Campbell: [00:21:21] The jury was being asked to make a decision based purely on fingerprints. And they brought Walter Henry Charles down from New South Wales as a fingerprinting expert to testify in this case. And during that case, he actually said that no two people had fingerprints that were alike, which was an amazing statement for that time and one that was met by disbelief.
Sarah Mashman: [00:21:43] 29000 fingerprints had been compared to the mark left on the ginger beer bottle.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:21:48] Twenty nine thousand. Come on. In 1912, there was what? Maybe over half a million people in Melbourne. I mean, it’s not exactly definite.
Sarah Mashman: [00:21:59] I know, but the jury was convinced. They found Parker guilty. And Judge Johnson sentenced him to seven years hard labor. I found the judge’s sentencing comments in a newspaper article in The Daily News from 1912.
Voice Actor: [00:22:13] You are one of the most dangerous species of criminals. You have been engaged in offences of a serious character, skillfully executed and leaving no trace. Had it not been for the fingerprints that blessed improvement in the means of detecting crime, you would have gone on unwhipped of justice.
Sarah Mashman: [00:22:32] Parker ended up appealing the case on the basis that there was no other evidence.
Nerida Campbell: [00:22:37] The only evidence against him was fingerprinting evidence. And was that good enough, strong enough in a court in 1912.
Sarah Mashman: [00:22:44] And most of us think our fingerprints are unique. But is this really the case?
Claude Roux: [00:22:50] This question of are fingerprints unique. I think it’s the wrong question. It’s impossible to have every single fingerprint of every single individual that is born and gives the impression that forensic sciences is really absolute truth and black and white.
Sarah Mashman: [00:23:05] It turns out over in France, Edmond Locard had been thinking about that question, too.
Claude Roux: [00:23:10] At the time when fingerprints had central stage Locard had a very interesting story and really warning people about focusing on only one type of traces. And he said that if there has been a break and enter in a bar at night and we find a fingerprints, this fingerprint may be very good to identify the person who left it and was on the premises. But if the defendant is saying, okay, I was in this bar because I’m the waitress lover, you know, fingerprints are not very good at distinguishing between lovers and thieves. And I think that little story really is a good summary of what we have to ask the right questions, because if you don’t ask the right questions. We had the wrong answers.
Sarah Mashman: [00:23:58] And when forensic science is used in the courtroom, that means the wrong person could be convicted.
James Robertson: [00:24:05] I would love to say that that never happens, but clearly there have been wrongful convictions around the world where sometimes a contributing factor or the sole cause of it has been human error. And someone giving the wrong result to the court.
James Robertson: [00:24:20] James Robertson grew up in Glasgow. For 20 years, He was the head of forensic science for the Australian Federal Police.
James Robertson: [00:24:28] I’ve been involved in a number of major commissions, royal commissions around the world that have looked at wrongful convictions. And in fact it was one of those cases, the Spratt royal commission that first brought me to Australia in 1983. So I’ve seen we have forensic science can’t go wrong.
James Robertson: [00:24:47] It comes down to people having realistic expectations of what the actual science means and not trying to make more of it. So when you see some of the worst wrongful convictions, they’re often because the justice system tries to get more out of the science than it’s actually worth.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:25:07] So the law is constantly squeezing science for a kind of certainty that science can’t necessarily give.
James Robertson: [00:25:19] For years there have been major reports from the United States in particular, but if you believed everything in them, then you would say that forensic science was not very reliable at all. Overall, I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating and in most instances, forensic sciences is very alive.
Sarah Mashman: [00:25:33] And the complexity comes when you add people.
James Robertson: [00:25:36] Wherever you have humans involved, then you will get human error. But in the forensic world, we can’t afford those mistakes to leave the laboratory and get into the court system because the consequences are too serious. I would love to turn around and say to you that that never happens, but clearly there have been wrongful convictions where sometimes a contributing factor, or the sole cause of it has been human error and someone giving the wrong result to the court.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:26:04] Okay. But I’ve seen CSI and because I believe everything I watch on television, I know that what happens is the investigators, they collect the evidence at the scene. They send the traces off to the lab where they do some magic and then BAM, they arrest the suspect. Haven’t there been technological advances that would give us a more certain result?
Sarah Mashman: [00:26:27] Actually, yes. And it was in a lab that Claude and an Australian team of researchers came up with something called the Australian Formula.
Claude Roux: [00:26:36] The Australian formula is a chemical used for the detection of fingermarks on porous surfaces, which is essentially a solution of indanedione zinc.
Sarah Mashman: [00:26:46] Law enforcement now use this formula around the world. It’s considered the best standalone technique to recover fingerprints on paper.
Claude Roux: [00:26:55] We made a big improvement in the technique when we realise that by adding zinc to the solution, we would make the technique much more robust. It means less amenable to the effect of changes in the environment or the paper. And so it could be universally used around the world.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:27:14] So how does it work?
Sarah Mashman: [00:27:16] Well, to find out, we need to go to the lab.
Xanthe Spindler: [00:27:19] We can put some fingermarks down hours. As if you’re picking up a piece of paper. And see if we can detect them.
Sarah Mashman: [00:27:24] Dr Xanthe Spindler is a a forensic scientist who was part of the team that developed the Australian formula. She’s going to show us how it actually works.
Sarah Mashman: [00:27:34] Xanthe handles a white A4 piece of paper.
Xanthe Spindler: [00:27:38] We’re going into our wet lab where we do all of our chemical enhancement processes and then once we’ve done that, we can go into the dark room and see if we’ve developed any fingermarks.
Xanthe Spindler: [00:27:49] So the first thing we need to do is turn on the heat press. We’ll then pour out some of the indanedione zinc solution into a tray and we’ll soak the document. We let it air dry a little bit until it no longer smells like salt and vinegar chips. You’ll notice that very pungent smell of the acetic acid when we pull the document out and then we take it over to the hate press. It’s just the standard pants press. The same thing that you’d say in most stuff, dry cleaners and laundromats. And then we have our developed fingermarks. And we’re done!
Sarah Mashman: [00:28:23] Suddenly, bright pink marks start to reveal themselves on the page.
Xanthe Spindler: [00:28:27] So we’ve got quite a few really good intense pink ones over here right on the edges of the page. That’s a sign of very, very strong development.
Sarah Mashman: [00:28:37] The final step in the process is using a high intensity filtered light called a polilight. It’s really loud.
Claude Roux: [00:28:44] You see that lamp on CSI and all these TV shows. They have this sort of very cool colours you can change.
Sarah Mashman: [00:28:50] It’s an Australian invention, too. And what it does is enhance fingerprint detection. You’ll see it on basically every TV crime show.
Xanthe Spindler: [00:28:58] You can see these weaker fingermarks pop up in the fluorescence. And this is why techniques like indanedione zinc were just such a revelation on top of the existing techniques.
Sarah Mashman: [00:29:08] The Australian formula has allowed forensic scientists to better know and detect traces.
Claude Roux: [00:29:16] I think it’s great. We’ve been involved in fingerprint research for some time now and we knew that the fingerprint research that is going on in Australia is really top. So that was just a confirmation that Australia is a leader in fingerprint research.
Sarah Mashman: [00:29:30] But there’s a catch it wouldn’t lack in Brandon Mayfield’s case.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:29:34] But why?
Sarah Mashman: [00:29:35] Well, first, the print was found on plastic. The formula only works on porous surfaces like paper. But the second reason was more serious.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:29:44] Okay. Tell me.
Sarah Mashman: [00:29:44] When the Madrid bombings happened, the formula existed only in the lab and it hadn’t become available to law enforcement yet.
Claude Roux: [00:29:53] We have very high standard in forensic science in Australia and actually we even lead the world in terms of developing these standards. But we shouldn’t think either that by having standards we have a magic bullet because it’s only part of the whole ecosystem.
Sarah Mashman: [00:30:07] And that’s something that Brandon Mayfield has known all along.
Brandon Mayfield: [00:30:10] It’s good to have science in the courtroom and forensic science is a useful tool. In law school, we’re taught that every piece of evidence is like a brick in a wall. But the problem we have with the forensics community, particularly for fingerprint forensics, is they treat identification of the whole wall.
Sarah Mashman: [00:30:25] Forensic science is much more than applying methods or conducting tests. As Claude says, its success also depends on the ability to identify and answer a relevant question.
Claude Roux: [00:30:37] A modern model of forensic science are moving towards where you have a general forensic scientist, kind of a maestro in an orchestra who is here to help develop the questions, have a first assessment of the various traces, and then can direct the forensic investigation wherever it needs to go. Technology will help more and more, but nevertheless, we don’t have an automatic vacuum cleaner that can go through the scene and collect the relevant traces by itself and then bring it to the lab. The only way to collect that and recognise the relevant traces is for a human to work through hypotheses. And the development of hypotheses is something which at this stage the human brain is still way, way, way better than any machine. So I don’t think it’s so much about the technology that technology can help. I think it’s more a question of process and how we use the information and how we manage the uncertainty that is in there into forensic science.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:31:50] And the uncertainty that is inherent to life.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:31:53] Because I, for one, am glad that humans are at the centre of these decisions. I don’t want to live in a world where machines trained on dodgy data sets determine our fate in courts of law.
Sarah Mashman: [00:32:03] And I think the courts are always going to squeeze science for certainty. So it’s good to know that Claude and his field exist in the gap between them.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:32:13] You’ve been listening to History Lab. This is the final episode in our four part series on ‘The Law’s Way of Knowing’ where we’ve looked at histories that intersect with the law. Special things to our first collaborating STEMM academic Professor Claude Roux from the Centre for Forensic Science at UTS. Claude is also the current president of the International Association of Forensic Sciences. The Australian formula was developed by his team at UTS in conjunction with collaborators from the University of Canberra and the Australian Federal Police.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:32:45] This episode was made by producer Sarah Mashman, the executive producer is Emma Lancaster, sound engineering and mixing by Output Media. And our story consultant and editor was Belinda Lopez. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this episode. To Nerida Campbell from Sydney Living Museum, Rebecca Lee and Bruce Comber from the Australian Federal Police. Xanthe Spindler from the University of Technology, Sydney. James Robertson from the National Centre for Forensic Studies. And Brandon Mayfield, who is still practicing law in Oregon. Thanks also go to Celene can Golde founder of the Sydney Execution Project. Chris Lennard from Western Sydney University. And Simon Walsh from the Australian Federal Police. A special thanks to Joe Barnes for playing Judge Johnson from 1912.
Tamson Pietsch : [00:33:32] You can find out more about the Australian formula and the Centre for Forensic Science on our website History Lab Dot Net, where you can also listen to some bonus content on the future of the discipline. History Lab is made on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation whose land was never ceded. It is made by the Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios at UTS in collaboration with our media partner 2SER 107.3FM.
* Clarification: Distinguished Professor Claude Roux has collaborated with the US Secret Service, the Canadian Mounties, the UK Home Office and the Australian Federal Police on cases around the world.
However it is important to note that his engagement with international law enforcement is through research and not the operational side of law enforcement.
** Correction: Edmond Locard was referred to as a ‘French criminologist’ in the History Lab episode ‘A close match’ . We have since been made aware that Edmond Locard was not a criminologist, but instead he is known in the Forensic Science community as a ‘criminalist’. Criminalists have expertise in the forensic science discipline known as criminalistics. They identify, document, collect, test, analyse and preserve all physical evidence pertaining to a crime scene. They then interpret their findings to reconstruct the crime and establish a correlation with suspects.