Fingerprint mutilation, means of hiding identity
The law enforcement officials from crime labs all over the country say that many suspects try to hide their identity using fingerprint mutilation.
The federal prosecutors from Massachusetts arrested and charged three doctors for performing surgeries resulting in the mutilation or permanent removal of fingerprints. One of them was Jose Elias Zaiter-Pou, a doctor from the Dominican Republic, who performed the surgery on patients for a 4,500 dollars tariff. Stephen G. Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services, says that there are multiple methods of fingerprint mutilation, from people chewing on fingers, using knives, burning acid, cigarettes and, for the ones that have more money or brains, surgical methods. FBI forensics examiners have noticed an increasing in the number of fingerprints mutilation, but the forensics technology is quite advanced, so that mutilation has proved to be useless in most cases, since even severely damaged fingers will provide investigators with clues.
Detective Lieutenant Kenneth Martin from Massachusetts State Police says that criminals are wrong when believing that fingerprint mutilation will work and that prints that could not have been identified 10 or 15 years ago are easy to trace now, so, basically, the criminals go through pain for no reason. Joe Polski, chief operations officer of the International Association for Identification, says that fingerprint mutilation is rare, and that draws more attention on the suspect so the forensics experts will look further at the criminal’s background because they will suppose that he is a recidivist.
The first case of fingerprint mutilation occurred in the 1930s, when the famous bank robber John Dillinger wanted to escape identification by using acid to burn his fingertips
