State Supreme Court Approves of Variable-Prior-Odds Presentation of the Bayesian Probability of Paternity

In 2002, the Supreme Court of Kentucky wrote a disappointing opinion on the admissibility of the "probability of paternity" in a c...

False Justice and Prosecutors' Fallacies

False Justice , by Jim and Nancy Petro, is an engaging, first-person tale of a former Ohio Attorney General's involvement in correcting ...

Sample Evidence: What’s Wrong with ASTM E2548-11 Standard Guide for Sampling Seized Drugs?

Samuel Johnson once observed that “You don't have to eat the whole ox to know that it is tough.” Or maybe he didn't say this, 1 / bu...

Beyond the Higgs Boson: The “Prosecutor’s Fallacy” Does Not Explain Why Experimenters Are Cautious About Announcing New Discoveries

A posting of July 6, 2012, " The Probability that the Higgs Boson Has Been Discovered ,"  mentioned the transposition of a p-value...

Latent Fingerprint Identification in Flux?

Two recent articles suggest that seeds of change are taking root in the field of latent fingerprint identification. I. The Emerging Paradigm...

Can Forensic Pattern Matching Be Validated?

An article in the latest issue of the International Statistical Review raises (once again) fundamental questions for forensic scientists: ...

Frontline's Expose of DNA Testing: Yes and No

The content of a recent Frontline story on “ The Surprisingly Imperfect Science of DNA Testing: How a Proven Tool May Be Anything But ” will...

"Remarkably Accurate": The Miami-Dade Police Study of Latent Fingerprint Identification (Pt. 2)

A week ago, I noted the Justice Department’s view that a “study of ... latent print examiners ... found that examiners make extremely few er...

A Probability for Dog DNA

A pet peeve of many statisticians is the transposition fallacy—misconstruing the probability of the data given the hypothesis as the probabi...