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.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/fingerprinting-to-solve-crimes-n...
Yes, it is.
> false positives exist
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.)
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.)
This is the case for many types of evidence; witness statements for example can also be notoriously unreliable. It's not bad to use this kind of evidence, but you do have a problem if you consider any witness statement to be absolute truth and never consider any "reasonable doubt" there may be, and this is how you end up convicting people based purely on "I saw the suspect commit the crime from 50 metres away in the dark and I'm sure it was him!" or some such.
If you have six independent witness statements like that, or a witness statement and fingerprints then the reasonable doubt starts becoming a lot less reasonable.
This is also the problem with the case in this article: a piece of evidence over which it seems like reasonable doubt should exists is the singular piece of evidence tying this person to the crime. The problem here isn't the evidence as such IMHO, but that juries and/or defenders (depends on the case) seem exceedingly bad at sceptically examining physical evidence.