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Show TRUST IN FINGERPRINTS NOW FIRMLY ESTABLISHED s Hundreds of Thousands Are on File In United States Investigation Investiga-tion Bureau. Washington. Despite the hun dreds of thousands of- fingerprin!s which the bureau of Investigation of tlie Justice department Is collecting col-lecting and cataloguing, it takes only five minutes for experts to discover dis-cover whether duplicates of some submitted fingerprints are on file, states J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the Investigation bureau. Sixteen hundred prints received in one morning's mail will he classified and letters regarding them written writ-ten within 4S hours. Neither court3 nor Juries need any further convincing about the reliable evidence of fingerprints, Mr. Hoover states, because While a man's appearance may change his fingerprints never do. Some public distrust of fingerprints finger-prints resulted some years ago, Mr. Hoover states, because when a welt-known welt-known criminal escaped from Leavenworth Leav-enworth penitentiary his fingerprints finger-prints were sent to Washington as a basis for an Identification order. or-der. These prints did not tally with any fingerprint classification on file in the department. The chief of police in the town where this criminal crim-inal was originally arrested then sent in fingerprints that he had taken of this man, and these were found to be entirely different from the Leavenworth prints. The explanation, Mr. Hoover said, Is thnt prisoners were employed In the identification work at Leavenworth. Leaven-worth. They conspired to mix the fingerprints up so lliat those actually actu-ally going on file were partly of one man and partly of another. |