A Courtroom Looks Different When You Are Sitting on the Witness

But for Byron Mitchell, a quiet, husky, bespectacled bear of a man in his mid-fifties, the proceedings were anything but academic. Mitchell was on trial for allegedly driving the getaway car in the 1991 robbery of an armored vehicle. No one had been hurt, but Mitchell, facing a conviction for armed robbery, was looking at spending most of the rest of his life in prison. The forensic evidence that linked him to the getaway car was the toughest sort to beat: two fingerprints lifted from the steering wheel and the gearshift. Mitchell's only hope was to undermine the credibility of the world's most widely trusted form of forensic proof. It was this endeavor that brought him to a federal courtroom in Philadelphia on a sweltering July morning, where he sat surrounded by four earnest public defenders, a determined prosecutor, some of the country's leading fingerprint examiners, three iconoclastic academics, and a patient but skeptical judge.