THE justice minister, Cathy Jamieson, was facing calls for her resignation last night after a damning report into the country's fingerprint service found it was still beset with "fundamental weaknesses" - ten years after the Shirley McKie case first highlighted problems.
Members of the Scottish Parliament's Justice 1 Committee had carried out a year-long probe - the longest inquiry yet by a Holyrood committee - in the wake of the case. And they uncovered a series of failures within the management of the Scottish Fing
erprint Service.
That prompted McKie supporters in the SNP to claim that the minister had misled parliament by maintaining that many of the problems had been resolved.
The report said there were "fundamental weaknesses" in the service which had to be addressed.
It flagged up concerns about quality assurance, exceptionally high levels of sickness in the Glasgow fingerprint bureau and frequent changes of personnel higher up the organisation.
Ms McKie, a former policewoman, of Troon, Ayrshire, had been accused of leaving a fingerprint at the scene of a murder.
She received a £750,000 out- of-court settlement from the Scottish Executive after being cleared of perjury.
The inquiry was established to discover what lessons could be learned from the case.
The committee said it was "disturbing" that at the time of the case there appeared to be no procedure or standard for the comparison of a print found at the scene with one taken for elimination purposes.
The report said: "The committee considers that the general public will be even more troubled about the lack of common operational standards across the SFS.
"For example, on an issue as fundamental as the approach to an identification and verification of a fingerprint, there is still not one system for the whole of Scotland. Indeed, up to recently there were three.
"Put simply, the committee considers that this is unacceptable."
Nationalists said that the report made the justice minister's position untenable.
"I said all along that Cathy's position is untenable," the SNP Central Scotland MSP, Alex Neil, said. "She is supposed to be the minister for justice, but has actually become the minister for injustice."
