THREE STORIES ABOUT FINGERPRINTING
Long past, near past, and...
Stories from the Bangor Daily News
May 21, 1943: “In the welter of other bills before the Legislature this law received little
public attention and was not generally known until the identification officers met yesterday to
map a program to meet the task. …The law requires ‘all children in the state attending public
schools, or their equivalent, shall be fingerprinted for civilian identification.’” Note this
news clipping refers to Maine’s law, passed during World War II, specifically to facilitate
reunification of families should war come to our shores.
March, 1944: “FINGERPRINTING OF BANGOR PUPILS TO BEGIN MONDAY. Two sets of prints are to be
taken, one to be forwarded to State Police headquarters and the other to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.”
1969: “According to Captain Jordan, Maine is the only state in the union which fingerprints all
its schoolchildren. He stressed the school files are not used for the investigation of criminal
cases [author’s italics]. ...The fingerprints are a requirement for graduation. He said that
new civil rights legislation apparently makes it impossible for any other state to adopt a
similar mandatory fingerprinting system comparable to Maine’s.”
February 9, 1973: “The Maine Legislature completed its sixth week Thursday with the Senate
enacting a bill to end the practice of fingerprinting schoolchildren. Rep. Theodore Curtis, Jr.,
R-Orono, sponsored the bill to end the program, saying it is costly and some parents object to
the prints being taken. State Police, who maintain the files, agreed with Curtis. In addition,
they said the program tied up troopers who would otherwise be on highway patrol.”
As Ardenna Hamlin, the woman who researched this information, has said: “Maine has already been
there, done that, repealed it.”
...not used for criminal investigations? Didn't we hear that somewhere just a couple years ago?
All well and good…until we come to story number two. Remember, we learned a moment ago that
“the school files are not used for the investigation of criminal cases.” Enter Bradley Beckett,
a Maine schoolteacher, sadly recently deceased. Brad was fingerprinted as a child in the
mid-1960s, as required by law. Many years later, in the mid-1980s, he was visiting an older
couple in Scarborough, long-term friends he had not seen in quite a while. At one point Brad
picked up a framed photograph of the couple’s grown children as they described what they were
now doing. His thumbs must have pressed against the glass. A few weeks later, the older
couple’s house was vandalized. It was not long before police investigators showed up to
interview one of their suspects: Brad. Remember, those prints were not to be used for criminal
investigations, or so the public was told.
Spreading the net. Gotta catch some fish, somehow
Story number three. In the year 2000, Julie Grab was a 24-year veteran teacher in the Bangor
Schools. She opposed Maine’s current fingerprinting law, and had co-authored in the Bangor
Daily News a guest column articulating her own humiliating experience of submitting to
fingerprinting while students pointed fingers and laughed through the Bangor High School
cafeteria windows. She sent in her recertification application in July, 2000. She subsequently
checked with the DOE each month thereafter. By October they confirmed that her certification
was set to go but that she did not have clearance from the criminal background check. Julie
suspected problems. She had once been arrested for trespassing while demonstrating at the
Bangor Post Office Building regarding U.S. involvement in El Salvador. She had received a
federal misdemeanor conviction…15 years before. No felony. Nothing to do with child
molestation or abuse. By February, 2001, the DOE confirmed that Julie’s application was being
held on the desk of the woman in charge of recertification, waiting for further FBI
information. By March that information was in and the application was sent on to the Deputy
Commissioner. Finally, in mid-April, Julie asked for the DOE’s disqualification policy and the
look-back period of the law. She received no clear answers. She reminded the woman in
recertification of the policy guidelines sent out by Commissioner Albanese the year before which
stated that there was a five-year limit on convictions unless it was a felony or had to do with
child welfare. She then told the woman that her next phone call would be through an attorney.
She got her recertification two weeks later. It is worth noting that the protracted holding up
of Julie’s recertification coincides with the period during which the Legislature was
struggling—unsuccessfully—to get any sort of data from the DOE on the number of school
employees found to have disqualifying offenses.
When Julie’s case was brought to Governor Angus King’s attention, he called Julie personally,
and also presumably officials at the DOE, and then told Julie that he believed her case “had
been mishandled.” His veto of the Legislature’s effort to repeal the law followed within hours.
... and a fast forward...
And so here we are. What we know is that Maine tried mass fingerprinting once before, only to
reject it finally. We know that the State continued to hold and use children’s fingerprints for
criminal investigations decades later, despite their claims to the contrary. And we know that
the State does not seem bound by the statutory guidelines of the current fingerprinting law, as
seen in Julie Grab’s case, when they complied only when threatened with legal action.
What we don’t know is what the future holds, and how quickly and how extremely excesses and
abuses of the current law and others like it will take their toll on the Bill of Rights. The
threat from school employees with undiscovered out-of-state child abuse convictions remains
undemonstrated. The threat to everyone’s civil liberties is clear.