Monday, April 13, 2009

Background materials on shoddy forensics

Via the Innocence Blog:
The National Academy of Sciences Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Science Community posted a wealth of forensic research and presentations on its website this week – including the complete submissions from dozens of presenters at its five public meetings.
I was particularly interested to see this presentation (pdf) by Michael Risinger, a law professor at Seton Hall University, calling for blind administration and testing for error rates in all forensic disciplines. See especially the chart on page 2 of the presentation listing error rates for common forensic techniques.

RELATED: Plain Error points to a new report from the Innocence Project of New York titled "Investigating Forensic Problems in the United States: How the Government Can Strengthen Oversight through the Coverdell Grant Program."

Related Grits posts
:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for directing us to the presentation on error rates in common forensics. I was amazed at the bitemarks error rate of greater than 64%, as well as fingerprint errors well over 5%.
Very scary stuff.