ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the early history of fingerprinting evidence, showing how rapidly fingerprinting was accepted by courts and what limited scrutiny it received. It aims to describe a more form of forensic identification, DNA profiling, and shows how there are certain surprising similarities between the legal reception of fingerprinting at the beginning of the twentieth century and the early reception of DNA identification techniques. The chapter also shows how challenges to DNA profiling, in conjunction with doctrinal shifts in the standards governing the admissibility of expert evidence, have opened the door to new challenges to fingerprinting evidence, threatening to destabilize a form of proof that has long been considered one of the most authoritative forms of evidence. Fingerprint examiners’ willingness, even their eagerness, to undergo in-court testing stood in pointed contrast to handwriting identification experts. Fingerprinting therefore offered precisely the kind of scientific certainty that judges and commentators, weary of the perpetual battles of the experts, yearned for.
