The jury in the Michael Jackson trial heard from a Secret Service forensic scientist, Antonio Cantu, yesterday.
He stated that it was possible that the fingerprints of Gavin Arvizo, found on an adult magazine, could have degraded in the year it took police to test the magazine after it was seized.
Cantu stated that he was not aware of the delay in the fingerprint tests, and noted that it would have been preferable for the tests to have been done immediately.
Cantu said that residue from fingerprints can change over time, although he added that some fingerprints have lasted as long as 50 years.
The judge ordered the comment stricken, because the witness is not a fingerprint identification expert.
The prosecution has said that one magazine seized from Jackson's Neverland ranch has a single fingerprint from Gavin Arvizo, and one print from Jackson. The defence claims that Gavin could have handled the magazine during the grand jury hearings, before it was subjected to fingerprint analysis.
Defence attorney Robert Sanger asked Cantu whether he would expect the analysis to be done after the material had been presented to a grand jury.
"You would expect to do that analysis first," Cantu said.
Cantu then admitted that he had not been aware that there had been a delay in testing for fingerprints.
In other news, Christopher Eric Carter a prosecution witness, was being held in Las Vegas on unrelated charges of kidnapping, burglary and robbery.
Carter was expected to testify that he once found Gavin Arvizo inebriated, and that Gavin had told him that Jackson had encouraged him to drink.
with all the new techniques being developed in crime scene investigations, dont you think that the detectives could tell whether the boys finger prints are from when he was a child? common sense would say that the finger prints would be smaller than the young mans finger prints today. also, wouldnt carbon dating or some other form of dating, be used to tell how old the finger prints are that were found on the magazines? we can tell how old dinosaur bones are but we cant tell how old a piece of evidence is? this sounds stupid to me. also, what do they mean when they say they cant tell if the computer images of pornoghraphy were spam or not. it is easy, you can tell when someone has opened their email and gone to the site. i think they need some computer analyst to take the stand . it seems to me that these people know less about the computer than i do and i am no wiz kid at it!
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