Savanna Abner Composition 1 Miss Martin October 1, 2017 Evolution of Fingerprinting Seven billion people live in the world and yet not one person has the same pattern on their fingers as another (“Fingerprints: The First ID”). This is what makes fingerprinting such an effective way of solving criminal investigation cases. Starting in 1981 during a crime case, Juan Vucetich came up with the idea of looking at someone’s pattern on their finger and recording it to be able to match it with criminal investigation evidence. Fingerprint analysis has evolved to become the most used way to identify a person during a court case (“Why Do We Have Fingerprints”). From recording fingerprints on thousands of paper files, to having the largest online records in the world, fingerprinting is very popular and has had a tremendous rate of growth over the years. Many steps have been …show more content…
In 2004, a man named Brandon Mayfield was arrested after he was accused of being the bomber of the Madrid Train bombing. Investigators took fingerprints of the crime scene, and when put into the Biometric system, matched those of Mayfield. After Brandon was in jail for two weeks, he was suddenly dropped of all charges and let out of jail. The FBI had found that since the fingerprint was not full it matched nearly twenty different people. Mathew Harwood states, “When finding evidence, if a fingerprint is only a half or not taken of a full finger, prints could match various different people” (Harwood). After realizing this, scientist and investigators spent time advancing the system to become more accurate. If a portion of a fingerprint was entered into the Biometric system and multiple people were matches, the system went into more depth background information and research. The fingerprinting system was not perfect, but advancements were made and the situation has never happened again