News In Focus
16 February 2007
Report criticises weakness of fingerprint service
Holyrood’s Justice 1 Committee has heavily criticised the management of the Scottish Fingerprint Service.
Yesterday saw the publication of the long-awaited report into the Scottish Criminal Records Office in the wake of the Shirley McKie case.
The former police woman was awarded £750,000 in an out-of-court settlement last year, following her pursuit of damages after she was found not guilty of perjury in the courts when she claimed not to have been in the house of murder victim Marion Ross.
David Asbury was later found guilty of murdering Miss Ross, but this conviction was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2002 and Miss Ross’s murder remains unsolved.
The Holyrood report, which took 11 months to complete and gathered more than 80 hours of evidence from the parties involved, states that there are serious weaknesses in the service that need to be tackled, although the service has taken significant steps to improve.
The weaknesses identified included the leadership and management of the service, and its procedures and quality assurance. MSPs have called for better ways to deal with external challenges to fingerprint identification.
The report criticises Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, and the former Lord Advocate Colin Boyd for refusing to hand over a police report into SCRO staff.
The committee also stated that Ms McKie’s £750,000 award should have included a gagging clause to stop her commenting on the issue any further.
The Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson said she accepted the committee’s view that the hard work of improving the fingerprint service still needed to be done.
She stated: "We will now need to give careful and detailed consideration to the Committee's conclusions and recommendations.
"We have been working hard to improve the fingerprint service. We have passed vital legislation to bring together the key police support services - including the Scottish Criminal Records Office - into a new agency which will have strengthened accountability, more consistent practices, and a clearer identity. A new Scottish Forensic Science Service will be one part of that.
She went on to say that the Executive had settled the case with Ms McKie last year because ministers were convinced that this was the right thing to do, and that it was now her job to ensure that such a “tangled set of circumstances” was not repeated.
The four fingerprint experts at the centre of the inquiry said they were pleased that the report showed that there was no malice involved, while Ms McKie’s father Iain said the report merely added confusion to confusion.