8127/frame/fm

Sidebar 2
Alphonse Bertillon — The Case 
of the Missing Minutiae
Many students of criminalistics have heard of a case in which fingerprints were doctored in such a
way as to produce an apparently false match. Although Bertillon studied fingerprints in great detail
and was, in fact, the first on the Continent to solve a crime using them, he insisted until his death
that fingerprints alone could not identify an individual with absolute certainty. The following passage,
taken verbatim from Henry Rhodes biography of Bertillon, may well be the source of this story. It is
not a case, per se, simply an instance of Bertillon apparently attempting to point out what he believed
to be a limitation to fingerprint comparison.
In 1912, two years before his death, he [Bertillon] published an article in the 
Archives of Lacassagne
that purported to show that the points of resemblance upon two fingerprints of different origin
might in certain circumstances show an apparent correspondence. The article was illustrated
with the excellent photographs he knew so well how to take. They were ingeniously reproduced
to indicate how, if certain portions of the pattern were not shown, what remained might suggest
correspondences which would produce an appearance of identity in different fingerprints. This
thesis was purely academic. It did not explain how the artificial conditions he created to produce
these fragmentary designs could have occurred in practice. Advocates of the fingerprint system,
which was now well established, also declared that his “points of resemblance” were not points
of resemblance at all, since they showed only the same general form.
In 1993, Champod, Lennard, and Margot reproduced Bertillon’s photographs (see figure) along
with several passages translated from the French. From these passages, it is clear that, no matter how
crude or unrealistic his mock-ups of apparently matching prints, he possessed a fundamental under-
standing of the nature of dermal ridge print evidence, and an appreciation of the limitations. In
particular, he points out the value of inspecting the prints for dissimilarities as well as similarities,
and the fact that even one unexplainable dissimilarity must lead to an exclusion, no matter how many
other corresponding points.
At the same time, one must note the total absence of dissimilarities in the clearly visible parts
of the prints.
And in an interesting foreshadowing of issues that many a DNA analyst would do well to heed,
The only way to completely eliminate this hypothesis, in the case where the accused has a brother
who may also be a suspect, is to record the brother’s fingerprints and check that his prints do
not show all the particularities found in the evidential marks.
He, in fact, does explain his fabrication of the falsely matching prints and expresses his realization
that they would be virtually impossible to reproduce in a true case.
It can be seen that by appropriate cut-outs, it would be possible, through the consultation of
numerous documents, to obtain fairly extensive fingerprint zones that show a certain number
of common particularities without any notable dissimilarities. However, it is evidently unlikely
that portions of fingerprints left at random by a criminal would precisely reproduce such arti-
ficially chose zones.
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The Evolution of Forensic Science
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