Perrow’s analysis of marine accidents is suggestive of the type of
“normal accident” that a latent print misattribution might be. These are
accidents that are to some extent caused by creating an erroneous image of
the world and interpreting all new, potentially disconfirming, information in
light of that “expected world.” As Perrow puts it:
[W]e construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the
present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find
reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely
interactions are ignored when we make our construction.369
Now consider Wertheim père’s description of latent print
identification:
[T]he examiner would proceed with experimentation (finding features in the latent
print, then examining the inked print for the same features) until the instant that the
thought first crystallizes that this is, in fact, an identification. . . . The examiner
continues to search for new features until it is reliably proven that each time a new
feature is found in the latent print, a corresponding feature will exist in the latent
print. 370