Shirley McKie receives apology ...Public receives pablum!

Shirley McKie received a brief, pro-forma apology as the Forensic Services and Strathclyde police bask in whitewash. The official party line is now that fingerprint comparisons are merely the opinions of scientists and scientists are prone to disputes and conflicting opinions innocent of any underlying improper motivations.

The truth is simple.

Detective Constable Shirley McKie never entered the premises she had been guarding and therefore knew she could not have left her fingerprint on the jamb of the bedroom doorway. Her arrest and prosecution was almost certainly police retaliation for her having informed the defense lawyer of probable evidence contamination in a case that was embarrassing to the Strathclyde police. This was undoubtedly viewed by the police as a treasonous act of betrayal.

As to the two prints, it is now and always has been perfectly clear to anyone with the slightest training and experience in fingerprint examination that the impression made on Shirley McKie's official index card and the impression taken from the door jamb at the crime scene could not possibly have been made by the same finger. There is no valid basis for making any contrary claim and any expert who makes such a contrary claim does indeed do so on a basis other than a regard for the truthful reporting of his interpretations.

A photograph of Mike Tyson, a black male boxer, and a photograph of Paris Hilton, a white female media twit, bear several points of similarity but no matter how many such points of similarity are considered or what weight they are given no one would ever say that there is a forensic "match". And any Scottish inquiry that soft-pedals their questioning on such a matter does the Scottish public no good.

Shirley McKie was dragged thru the courts and railroaded into the poorhouse and the nuthouse by the Strathclyde Constabulary. She never entered the premises, she never had sex on the premises, she never lied about the case at all.

There is no question that the Shirley McKie case was a political one right from the start. As four Scottish experts testified that Shirley McKie had left the crime scene print there were five Scottish experts who were prevented from testifying that the crime scene print was not made by Shirley McKie and that any expert opinions to the contrary were clearly unsupportable. When the issue became an international one that extended to the entire fingerprint examination field, hordes of experts proclaimed that the crime scene print was definitely not from Shirley McKie. Many experts were also willing to add that anyone expressing an opinion that the crime scene print was that of Shirley McKie were not competent examiners.

Ian McKie: "We now have 13 experts proved to have made two misidentifications in the one case because of human error and frailty which they were able to sustain for nearly 14 years and in some cases still sustain. Throughout these years they were given countless opportunities to right the wrongs and accept their mistakes. Because of human error and despite having the most up to date identification tools available they were unable to do this and we must conclude innocently persisted with their provably flawed conclusions.

That not all these experts came from the same jurisdiction where it could be argued that the same culture, procedures and supervisory structures were in place only goes to reinforce the seriousness of the challenge fingerprinting faces from this report. We must assume that some of these conclusions were independently reached and did not result from some conspiracy, collective cultural arrogance or flawed organisational procedures. These were ordinary experts, many with a proven track record of excellence, who were able to get it wrong and persist in their erroneous conclusions."