Moistened Hands Do Not Necessarily Allude to High Quality Fingerprints: The Relationship Between Palmar Moisture and Fingerprint Donorship

• NCJ Number: 233513
• Journal: Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 56 Issue: S1 Dated: January 2011 Pages: S162-S165
• Author(s): Joseph Almog, Ph.D.; Hadar Sheratzki, B.Sc.; Michal Elad-Levin, Ph.D.; Assaf E. Sagiv, Ph.D.; Gagan Deep Singh, M.Sc.; Om Prakash Jasuja, Ph.D.
• Date Published: January 2011
• Length: 4 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study explored the quality distribution of ninhydrin-developed prints on A4 bond paper in two groups of individuals, in Israel and in India.

Abstract

While the quality distributions of the developed marks in both countries had some dissimilarities, both groups showed the expected bell-shape distribution, with the majority of the donors belonging to the central zone, defined as "average" or "good." Attempt was made to correlate between a physiological feature, palmar moisture, and the fingerprint donorship. As a rule, high fingermark quality could be associated with sweating hands, but there were individuals with moist palms whose fingermarks had a low score and vice versa. This finding supports the logical but hitherto unproven assumption that besides the amount of palmar sweat, the other physiological factor governing the prints' quality is the total amount of substrate, amino acids in this case, in the latent deposits, which depends on the substrate concentration in the sweat. (Published Abstract)