Shelby County's Fingerprint System "Almost" Fail-Safe
Updated March 11
By Andy Wise
MEMPHIS -- Digital pixels instead of ink smears and blots.
That's the difference between Carlos Peppers driving a day care van or not driving a day care van.
Since July 2002, Shelby County has taken criminal offenders' fingerprints electronically, archiving and updating them daily in the AFIS system. Fingerprint experts check them, process them, then export them to the TBI via the Internet. The TBI's AFIS system then spits back a printout acknowledging the receipt of the fingerprints within two to three hours.
"The person will still be in our custody," says Wayne Logan, Assistant Manager of the Shelby County jail's offender information system. "If there's a problem that TBI has with the fingerprints, we can fingerprint that person because they're still here."
That was the problem with Peppers. When he was arrested and convicted in 2000, his fingerprints were taken by hand, with ink, on flash cards. According to procedure, the cards would have been mailed to the TBI in Nashville. It could take five to six weeks before the TBI would confirm the receipt of the prints.
But now there's no record of the prints at the TBI. Shelby County Sheriff Mark Luttrell says the county has the original prints, but somehow, someplace, they were lost between here and TBI headquarters.
Since the Tennessee Department of Human Services is required to run background and fingerprint checks on day care workers through the TBI, Peppers' sex conviction never came up when he was hired a little over a year ago. The old manual system of ink and cards let Peppers slip by.
Luttrell says DHS ought to be allowed to double-check fingerprint records not only with the TBI, but also directly with Shelby County's system. "One phone call, and we can get it lined up," says Luttrell.
Neither TBI nor DHS officials were available for comment, but Luttrell says he phoned TBI's top brass to suggest some sort of an arrangement to let DHS investigators access the county's AFIS system.
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