CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — A former school bus driver in Cedar Rapids accused of sexual misconduct is scheduled to go on trial May 11. Linn County court records say Thomas Williams pleaded not guilty last week to misdemeanor charges of false imprisonment and sexually exploitation by a school employee. Investigators have said Williams forced a 10-year-old girl to sit on his lap inside the bus he drove Jan. 2 in a district parking lot. Court documents say he grabbed the girl’s head and tried to kiss her before she pulled away and left the bus. The district has since fired Williams.

(Radio Iowa) — Researchers at Iowa State University are looking to expand on the information that can be gathered after the whorls, loops and arches of fingerprints are identified. I-S-U graduate student in chemistry, Paige Hinners, want to be able to put a time on when a fingerprint was created. She says the idea came out of other research into fingerprint information. She says people are trying to determine if they can establish age, ethnicity, and gender based on the compounds found in a fingerprint.

Fingerprint analysis (NSF.Gov. image)

Hinners saw the degradation of chemicals could possibly give a timestamp for fingerprints. “What I originally set out to do was to use a physical and chemical method –so we use mass spectrometry imaging — meaning we get a chemical profile and a spatial profile — so I could actually see where the chemical is on the fingerprint ridges,” according to Hinners. So, what I wanted to look at was how the compounds in the fingerprint ridge diffused with time.” She says the early research has shown they can create a chemical image of the print. “The older the fingerprint got, the more I lost the fingerprint ridges in my chemical image. And so, that’s kind of what led us into looking at what was happening in those compounds,” Hinners says.

Hinners says everyone has a couple of different types of chemicals in their fingerprints. “There can be both sweat-based, and then kind of like grease-based residues in your fingerprint. So, when you touch a surface you’re leaving a combination of that behind,” Hinners explains. “And the oily portion actually comes from you touching your face, touching your hair, touching other areas of your body where you have sebaceous glands and those secret lipids and it’s more oily. You touch a glass and you see a fingerprint on there — you are leaving some of that material behind.”

Hinners says they’ve done a small survey of fingerprints kind of as a proof of concept. “We just did a study from fresh through seven days age. So, even by one day age, we were able to tell that those fingerprints had been exposed to an ambient environment, and they were no longer fresh,” Hinners says.  The research confirmed that ozone in the air was causing the degradation of the unsaturated fats in fingerprints. Hinners says knowing when a fingerprint was left can help in narrowing when someone was at a crime scene. “If you’ve ever heard the defense ‘I was there the week prior.’ So this kind of just assists in locking down and says ‘yes’ this fingerprint is from within the crime window — so we know it happened during this time — and the fingerprint also came from this time,” Hinners says.

She says it could also be helpful if you don’t have a suspect and can tell that one set of fingerprints was left during the time of the crime and rule out others. Hinners says there needs to be a lot more study with a larger test pool of fingerprints to move toward making a time determination on a fingerprint something that can be used in a case. “To get something presented in court is a very difficult task. It has to meet many different standards. And I think the very broad team is it has to be generally accepted by the scientific community,” she says.

A National Institute of Justice grant is supporting the research.

KNOXVILLE, Iowa (AP) — A judge has again ruled that a civil trial verdict holding a man responsible for his mother’s death will stand although the man was acquitted after a criminal trial on a murder charge. Marion County Judge Martha Mertz released her decision Monday in the case against Jason Carter. The civil verdict ordered him to pay $10 million to his mother’s estate. His father had filed a wrongful death lawsuit against his son, saying Jason fatally shot Shirley Carter in June 2015 to gain access to his parents’ assets. In March a jury found Jason Carter not guilty of the murder charge.

(Radio Iowa) — Democrats are calling for the legislature to investigate patient care at the state-run Glenwood Resource Center. Recently-released email appears to show an administrator in the Department of Human Services knew 20 months ago that disabled patients at Glenwood were to be part of a “sexual preoccupation” study. Representative Ruth Ann Gaines of Des Moines is the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. “With this new information, it is our job as lawmakers to find out what’s going on,” Gaines said.

Senate Democratic Leader Janet Petersen of Des Moines says it’s past time for legislators to seek answers from the executive branch. “We have a Government Oversight Committee for a reason and it should have been meeting long ago on this issue,” Petersen says. The Des Moines Register recently received email, texts and other documents from the Iowa Department of Human Services. The material indicates some staff at the Glenwood facility were warning the agency’s very top manager of several problems. Representative Dave Deyoe, of Nevada, was among a handful of lawmakers who met with then-D-H-S director Jerry Foxhoven a year ago to raise concerns. “Foxhoven said none of this was going on,” Deyoe says, “that they couldn’t do studies there, that’s not their job to do studies and it would be illegal if they did.”

The governor fired Foxhoven this past summer for undisclosed reasons. The manager who seems to have approved the sex-related study recently retired. Deyoe and other Republicans in the legislature say lawmakers should defer to the U.S. Department of Justice investigation of patient treatment at the Glenwood Resource Center rather than have the state legislature launch an investigation at this time.