Journal
JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES
Volume 58, Issue 6, Pages 1519-1530Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1556-4029.12203
Keywords
forensic science; fingerprints; decision making; expertise; testimony; judgment; law; policy
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Funding
- Fulbright Scholarship
- Australian Research Council
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Although fingerprint experts have presented evidence in criminal courts for more than a century, there have been few scientific investigations of the human capacity to discriminate these patterns. A recent latent print matching experiment shows that qualified, court-practicing fingerprint experts are exceedingly accurate (and more conservative) compared with novices, but they do make errors. Here, a rationale for the design of this experiment is provided. We argue that fidelity, generalizability, and control must be balanced to answer important research questions; that the proficiency and competence of fingerprint examiners are best determined when experiments include highly similar print pairs, in a signal detection paradigm, where the ground truth is known; and that inferring from this experiment the statement The error rate of fingerprint identification is 0.68% would be unjustified. In closing, the ramifications of these findings for the future psychological study of forensic expertise and the implications for expert testimony and public policy are considered.
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