Havvard Case Study

In 1998, Havvard was taken into police custody once again from his grandmother’s house. At the time, it had been suspected that he had been residing with the woman for a while and that was the reason why the officers went there to locate him. They knocked on the door and requested that Havvard reveal himself to them, but he refused to do so. When he didn’t appear as soon as they asked him to, the police officers began to search the home in the hope that they could still find him there. The officers involved located Havvard on the second floor of his grandmother’s home where he had been hiding the entire time (United States v. Havvard). In this room, they also located a gun. Since he had already been convicted of a crime prior to this day, Havvard owning a weapon was against the law. It was because of this that they were allowed to arrest him once more and bring him …show more content…
They were tested in a lab and the examiners concluded that they did match the ones taken from Havvard. It was this evidence used in the trial that was called into question during the appeals process later on. Havvard first argued that fingerprints weren’t found to be reliable yet and it was due to that reason that they shouldn’t be allowed in his case. In order to fight those claims, they courts relied upon the testimony they had already heard by Stephen Meager. Stephen Meager worked for the FBI and was a fingerprint expert at the time of this case. While he spoke to the jury, he went into great detail about how the fingerprint process actually works and why it should be considered to be reliable. He stated during his testimony that,
“the error rate for fingerprint comparison is essentially zero. Though conceding that small margin of error exists because of differences in individual examiners, he opined that this risk is minimized because print identifications are typically confirmed through peer review.” (United States v.