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...

A DNA match statistic of, say, one in one million means that approximately one person out of every one million in a population will match that DNA profile. Now consider a juror who hears that one in every one hundred thousand people in, say, Houston who are not the source will match...

Part II defines the relevance ratio and explains its relation to probabilistic reasoning. Part Ill uses the ratio to explore the ways in which physicians have misused the term "consistent with sexual abuse" in child abuse cases. Part IV considers whether symptoms "consistent with sexual abuse,"...

Although the use of statistical testimony at trial has increased dramatically during the past two decades,' tensions between statistics and the law remain. Where the law strives for certainty, statistical evidence frames the world in uncertain, probabilistic terms. This tension has sparked a...

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...

Breaking the Deadlock by Judge Richard Posner is a provocative book about the controversy surrounding the 2000 Presidential election. Posner's tone is characteristically confident and his assaults on those he disagrees with (e.g. the Florida Supreme Court and the legal academy) are pointed and...

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...