Converging legal and scientific forces are pushing the traditional forensic identification sciences toward fundamental change. The assumption of discernible uniqueness that resides at the core of these fields is weakened by evidence of errors in proficiency testing and in actual cases. Changes...

The possibility of error limits the strength of DNA evidence in the same way that it limits the strength of other kinds of legal evidence. However, a 1996 report by the National Research Council recommends against estimating an error rate derived from proficiency tests to help identify the...

After the National Academy of Sciences issued a stunning report in 2009 on the unscientific state of many forensic science subfields, forensic science has undergone internal and external scrutiny that it had managed to avoid for decades. Although some reform efforts are underway, forensic...

Part I of this paper discusses the issue of what the frequencies associated with DNA evidence do and do not mean. Part II describes an alternate way of presenting DNA statistics in court based on Bayesian likelihood ratios. This part also addresses issues associated with identifying the...

This Article identifies some of the subtle, but common, exaggerations that have occurred at trial, and classifies each in relation to the three questions that are suggested by the chain of reasoning sketched above: (1) Is a reported match a true match? (2) Is the suspect the source of the trace?...

The significance of reported DNA matches between a suspect and genetic material recovered from a crime scene is usually represented at trial by the random match probability (RMP). The RMP identifies the DNA profile frequency in a reference population. This paper shows that RMPs contribute little...

Reaching an accurate outcome is a central goal of the American trial. But structural features of the legal system, in combination with the cognitive shortcomings of legal actors, hinder the search for truth. Regarding the legal system, various rules and policies restrict decision makers' access...

Newell, Mitchell, and Hayes (NMH) conduct three experiments designed to test whether exemplar cuing (EC) theory or a statistical format theory provides a more accurate account for how people make judgments about low-probability events. They report finding support for the statistical format...

Consumers often face decisions about whether to purchase products that are intended to protect them from possible harm. However, safety products rarely provide perfect protection and sometimes "betray" consumers by causing the very harm they are intended to prevent. Examples include vaccines...

Mutual fund companies selectively advertise their better performing funds. However, investors respond to advertised performance data as if those data were unselected (i.e., representative of the population). We identify the failure to discount selected or potentially selected data as selection...