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Fallible Fingerprints: The Dustup over Cognitive Bias

I just ran across a lengthy, excellent article on the sources and frequency of error in fingerprint forensics, published in the online magazine MillerMcCune.com last month: "Bias and the Big Fingerprint Dustup" (by Sue Russell, June 18). Here's how the story opens:In 2004, cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror and Dave Charlton, a veteran fingerprint examiner and doctoral candidate, chatted over coffee in a Brighton hotel suite after a gala dinner at the U.K. Fingerprint Society's conference. Charlton was upset. Months earlier, Dror had designed a study to see if fingerprint examiners' decisions on matches might unconsciously be biased by information they received about a case.Would examiners change their opinions about prints they'd called matches five years earlier, Dror wondered, if they viewed them again in a different context? Charlton, supervisor of a U...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on July 18, 2009 (boomark / email).