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Abstract:
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Statistics has emerged as a critical topic in ongoing discussions regarding the practice of forensic science. Forensic examiners assess and report on a wide range of evidence types for legal investigations and legal cases. Evidence types include DNA, glass fragments, fingerprints, shoe prints, firearms/ballistics, handwriting, and blood stain patterns. A 2009 National Academies report on forensic science and a subsequent 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology raised questions about the scientific underpinnings for the presentation of a number of types of forensic evidence. In addition, misapplication of forensic science was a contributing factor in nearly half of the more than 350 cases in which DNA helped The Innocence Project to exonerate wrongly-convicted individuals. This presentation reviews the ways in which statistics can contribute to the collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation of forensic-science evidence.
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