Yes, Prints Can Lie

Can Prints Lie? Yes, Man Finds to His Dismay:
"In front of the immigration judge, the tall, muscular man began to weep. No, he had patiently tried to explain, he was not Leo Rosario, a drug dealer and a prime candidate for deportation.

He was telling the truth. He was Rene Ramon Sanchez, an auto-body worker and merengue singer from the Bronx who bore not even a passing resemblance to Mr. Rosario, a complete stranger 12 years his junior and a half-foot shorter.

'Why don't you get his photo then?' Mr. Sanchez cried out in Spanish, pounding a fist into his palm. 'And compare my fingerprints with his?'"

The judge, Alan L. Page, had been told the prints were the same. "The general rule is, the prints don't lie," Judge Page had said earlier. "If you got the same prints that Leo Rosario has, you're Leo Rosario. And there's nothing I can do about it."

So Mr. Sanchez, in late 2000, was sent back for another week in a grim detention center in Lower Manhattan, severed from his family and livelihood, because his fingerprints had been mistakenly placed on the official record of another man.

Remarkably, this was not the first time Mr. Sanchez had paid for that mistake. He had been arrested three times for Mr. Rosario's crimes, and ultimately spent a total of two months in custody and was threatened with deportation before the mistake was traced and resolved in 2002.

Mr. Sanchez's ordeal, unearthed from court records and interviews, amounts to a strange, sometimes absurd odyssey through a criminal justice system that made a single error and then compounded it time and again by failing to correct it.

The limits of fingerprint evidence have been much in the news. An Oregon lawyer jailed as a material witness in the Madrid train bombings was freed this month after the F.B.I. said it had mistakenly matched his prints with others found near the scene of the attacks.

Mr. Sanchez's case, if less dire or public, is no less chilling a lesson in how easily a person's identity can be smudged in this era of shared databases, and how long it can take to cleanse it — particularly if, like Mr. Sanchez, he speaks little English and has a minor police record of his own.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/31/nyregion/31IDEN.html?pagewanted=all&position=