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The Science of Forensics

In 2005, Congress tasked the National Academy of Sciences to survey the landscape of forensic science. The result, this past February, was a 255-page report. Here are a few of the surprising facts they found.

By Matt Ransford Posted 27.3.09 at 3:28 pm 0 Comments

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Fingerprints
WikiCommons
In a 1995 proficiency test conducted by the International Association for Identification (IAI), a group of fingerprint examiners were given four complete reference sets of prints with which they were to identify seven unknown, latent prints. Only 44% of the participants were able to identify all seven correctly. To the IAI, the magnitude of error was shocking. What was more disconcerting than the error, however, was the certainty with which the examiners made their conclusions. Print examiners work in a very subjective space, assessing which details of a latent print are clear enough to compare with a known print. But no statistical model has yet been established to dictate just how many and which details need to align to determine a match, or even a partial match. It's for this reason that the experts present their findings as absolute--because they cannot scientifically quantify their results, the practice portends to have eliminated uncertainty when the reality is anything but.
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SciTech, csi, fingerprints, first clue, forensics, hair, probability; death; accidents; newsfront
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WikiCommons
"It's more likely that you will see testimony presented and results of analysis presented without quantification of certainty," says Dr. Constantine Gatsonis of Brown University, one of the committee co-chairs. That is a real problem for the forensic science community. "When you go into a hospital and doctors quote things to you, very often they don't quote error bars next to what they say, do they? [But] they have done lots and lots of studies so they know what the margins of error are. If it came to it, they could say, this is what we know about how accurate this test is." The problem with many of the subjective forensic science disciplines is that those studies have not been done in these fields. Without a recognized baseline with which to draw hard scientific conclusions, expert testimony will increasingly be called into question. In 2007, a Baltimore County Circuit judge refused to allow fingerprint analysis in a death penalty case because she found the analysis to be "a subjective, untested, unverifiable identification procedure that purports to be infallible."
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SciTech, csi, fingerprints, first clue, forensics, hair, probability; death; accidents; newsfront
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