PrepTest 136

Topic: Legal Studies

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Defendant’s argument
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • Defendant - The fingerprint evidence at my trial should be discounted
  • Reasoning - There are no studies showing no two people have the same fingerprints

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • More reasoning behind Defendant’s argument
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • No established error rates
  • Method - No objective standards (e.g., points of identification)

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • Author IDs herself, disagrees with Defendant
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • Author is judge in appeals court
  • Concession - Not scientific law
  • Defendant is wrong - fingerprint evidence OK
  • Fingerprints used for 100 years
  • Concession - Better standards and testing desirable

Paragraph 4

• Paragraph note
  • More rebutting of Defendant
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • Concession - Different agencies have different requirements
  • Method - All examiners held to same “points and characteristics” approach
  • Regular testing and training with uniform standards
  • Trial court was right to allow evidence

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Author criticizes fingerprint evidence
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • No objective standards on when two fingerprints match
  • One method - Ridge matches, but no consensus on number
  • Another method - Holistic

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • Questions about fingerprint reliability
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • Question set 1 - How likely is each “number” of ridge matches?
  • Question set 2 - Partial matches being wrong?
  • No one can answer, but answers are important

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • Question - error rate?
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
  • One study - Few to no errors
  • Criticism of study - Too lax
  • Another study - 34% error rate

Main Points:

Passage A - While further testing and development of fingerprint matching is desirable, this type of evidence has a long history of being successfully used in trials, and examiners are held to high standards, so the Defendant is wrong to try to get that evidence thrown out.

Passage B - There are too many questions and not enough answers about the reliability of fingerprint evidence.

Passage A:

• Lines 3-4 - One viewpoint is defined
• Lines 8-9; Lines 11-12 - That argument’s key elements are stated
• Lines 21-23 - The Author identifies herself and rebuts the other viewpoint

Passage B:

• Lines 36-37 - The Author’s viewpoint is stated (right out the gate!)
• Lines 50-52; Lines 53-56 - Questions that undermine the implied opposing point are asked
• Lines 61-62 - Another question that undermines the implied opposing point

These passages both discuss the same topic - the reliability of fingerprint evidence. Passage A ultimately rules that such evidence is reliable enough to be admissible in a criminal trial (Lines 33-35), while the Author of Passage B brings up many questions about reliability that haven’t yet been answered (Lines 50-52; Lines 53-56; Lines 61-62). So they have different opinions on that central topic.

Question/Answer - Passage B relies a lot on questions that don’t have answers to show that fingerprint evidence just isn’t at the point where it needs to be for us to feel that it’s reliable evidence. In general, the Author’s answer to questions raised is the main point of the passage. Here, however, since the Author’s point is that there are no definitive answers to these questions, that’s the main point.

Passage A has an Author that is more clearly defined than most authors are. While we can generally get a sense of the profession or at least field that a given author works in, here, we know that the Author is the judge in an appeals court, ruling on a Defendant’s appeal. That specificity might very well show up in a question, and it should color all of our answers that we select that reference the Author of Passage A.

Passage A actually has quite a few concessions. The Judge concedes that fingerprint identification isn’t a scientific law (Lines 24-26), it could have more consistent standards (Lines 19-21), and agencies do have different degrees of correlation required for a match (Lines 24-26). All of this means that, while she does reach a definitive conclusion, her viewpoint isn’t absolute - she believes that, while wrong, the opposing view/the Defendant has some valid points.

Passage B’s Author also has a weaker opinion than we might expect based on the overall argument. While he believes that there isn’t sufficient information to conclude fingerprint evidence is reliable, that’s not the same as saying fingerprint evidence is bad and is unreliable. His view is that more studies have to be done to determine the reliability - he may very well agree that, should it prove to be accurate a certain percentage of the time, it’s good evidence.

With these last two notes in mind, we have to be careful about what we commit the authors to, and what we say they disagree over. They both have more moderate views than might be initially apparent, so there’s more overlap in what they think might be the case than we might think.