Solve your Forensic Handwriting and Fingerprint Problems
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"Anup Kaphle",
Kathmandu,
Aheinous crime committed, the criminal absconding, the police and criminal agencies cannot solve the case by any means. Enter Forensic Science. It has developed thousands of broad solutions for solving such cases. Forensic science can be best explained as the application of science to criminal and civil laws enforced by police agencies in a criminal justice system. In fact it is a bridge between law and science, which includes different branches that find application in evidence analysis and crime scene investigation and reconstruction.
Forensic science involves the application of the principles and techniques of natural and physical sciences to analyse many types of crime scene evidence and reconstruction. It provides expert testimony concerning those results and conclusions.
It involves the analysis of physical evidence, which is carefully analysed based upon physical evidences that may have been recovered. Forensics’ another role is to provide expert testimony. “As the findings of a scientist may ultimately determine a person’s guilt or innocence, forensic scientists are required to testify in court with respect to their field expertise, methods used, and conclusions made on the evidence collected at the crime scene,” says Padma Raj Kaphle, fingerprint and handwriting expert and trustee of Nepal Forensics Society.
Forensic science has, within it, various methods of getting through the case.
Fingerprints: There are three basic fingerprint patterns — loops, arches and whorls according to Kaphle. Every human being falls into one of these three patterns. Within these patterns are what we call minutia points. Kaphle informs, “There are about 30 different types of miniature points, and no two people have the same types of minutiae of the same number in the same places on their fingertips. This is why our fingerprints are totally unique.”
Fingerprint patterns are hereditary. They are formed before one is born. So, fingerprints are best for identification purposes because they are totally unique and they never change. Fingerprints are formed underneath the skin in a layer called dermal papillae. “As long as that layer of papillae is there, the fingerprints will always come back, even after scarring or burning,” he describes.
Gloves do not necessarily help from leaving fingerprints. Surgical gloves were made to keep surgeons from infecting their patients and one can actually leave prints through surgical gloves. They fit so tightly that fingerprints ‘pass through’ the latex membrane. They can also be turned inside out to yield fingerprints from the inside surfaces. Leather gloves can be treated in the same manner, which can leave a print that is unique to that glove and no other. Even cloth gloves such as mittens, can leave a distinctive print that can be traced back to the mitten that made it. According to Kaphle, “Prints are made on a surface because we are constantly secreting water, body oils and other compounds through our pores. This material is left on the surface in the form of fingerprint.”
Different surfaces require different techniques for developing prints. In the movies, detectives are seen with brushes. They are powders that process the prints. Minute particles of powder cling to the print residue as the brush passes over it. The print is then lifted with tape. Another process involves fuming. Vapours of iodine and superglue will coalesce inside the print residue to reveal a latent print. Fingerprints can also be developed on objects that have been in water. Prints can be developed off the skin (such as from the neck of a strangulation victim). There are very few surfaces on which a print cannot be developed.
Computers have revolutionised the techniques used to match fingerprints. Until recently, the old standard was the Henry Classification System; a cumbersome sequence of letters and numbers broken down into several levels of classification. It could take weeks, sometimes months to compare a suspect’s fingerprint with a department’s print files. The advent of digital technology has changed all of that. Prints can be scanned directly into a computer, doing away ink and fingerprint cards. Prints can be compared at a rate of 4,00,000 per second, which no one could do in their lifetime. This is called Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). Departments input all the prints from arrests and all of the print cards they already have on file to create an historical record. They also input all prints from any unsolved crimes, in the hope that a hit might come up from a routine arrest.
Handwriting: Handwriting analysis (Graphology), as a part of a battery of other psychological tests, also attracts some consideration and interest in the court of law. In cases of custody of children, following divorce, graphology is also listened to as a reinforcement of the personality assessment performed by the psychologists.
“Handwriting originates from thoughts in the brain and these thoughts and ideas are merely put into a viable and understandable form by the hand. The actual output is almost never an exact match of the original mental picture,” informs Kaphle.
The scientific side of this is based on experiments, statistical data, measurements and combination of technical characteristics. Just as fingerprints can be identified by unique combinations of loops and whorls, so each person’s handwriting contains particular combinations of unconsciously projected characteristics which, taken together, comprise the person’s personality.
Handwriting is distal; it occurs at extremities and involves fine motor activity. “One reason individuals find it difficult to stimulate the handwriting of others is that to do so successfully requires understanding the essence of the writer’s motor control programme and executing the same. Handwriting, being a free-form activity, it is highly unlikely that any person will write his own name exactly the same way twice in an entire lifetime,” Kaphle reasons.
Actually, every person has a range of handwriting variation determined by his physical writing ability, training in ‘penmanship’ and other factors. To an expert, a study of known samples of writing reveals individual writing characteristics, which can allow the expert to identify or exclude an individual as the author of the same.
Depending on the cultural setting when writing skill is learned, entire groups of individuals may be trained to write in the same way. As we grow and mature physically and personally, our handwriting becomes more of an individual product — through conscious changes made to fit a mental picture of how we want our writing to appear, or unconsciously. “Through
handwritings, we can trace out the exact person. But if there is a long time interval between the samples taken, the conclusion cannot be effective,” informs Mahendra Thapa, handwriting expert at Nepal Forensic Science Laboratory, RONAST. Handwriting is also affected by injuries, illness, medication, drug or alcohol, stress, the writing surface and instrument or attempted disguise.
DNA: DNA is pretty similar in case of all human beings. Everyone who has blue eyes has pretty much the same code for blue eyes and those with brown hair have same code for that hair. But these coding sequences are separated by ‘junk’ DNA, which itself is non-coding and only serves to separate the coding sequences.
These sequences are totally random and unique to an individual. The examining labs have samples of DNA, taken from a representative population group. These are entered into a database, to which the questioned DNA is compared for frequency among the particular population group.
Padma R. Kaphle