In all 50 states, those who have been convicted can, with a judge’s permission, run DNA evidence through a national database, sometimes yielding a hit on someone else. The same is not true of the national fingerprint database. Mr. Williams first requested that the fingerprints be run against the national database in 1999, but prosecutors opposed the move and there was no statute entitling him to do so. Yet only a handful of states allow post-conviction access to the fingerprint database, much less account for emerging technologies such as facial recognition. The man now believed to have committed the Baton Rouge rape that landed Mr. Williams in prison, Stephen Forbes, died in prison in 1996.

Source: New York Times March 22, 2019 00:00 UTC