Home > West's Encyclopedia of American Law > Fingerprints

Impressions or reproductions of the distinctive pattern of lines and grooves on the skin of human fingertips.

Fingerprints are reproduced by pressing a person's fingertips into ink and then onto a piece of paper. Fingerprints left on surfaces can be obtained and examined through a dusting process and other processes conducted by forensics experts.

The lines and grooves in fingertips are unique personal characteristics, and thus no two persons have identical fingerprints. Although various scientists had earlier observed the intricate and varying patterns of fingerprints, their use as evidence in trials is undocumented in Anglo-American law before the nineteenth century. In 1880 Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, suggested in a letter to the British journal Nature that fingerprints could be used for identification purposes in a criminal investigation. Courts in the United States began to accept fingerprints as...