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Posted on August 16, 2009
The Law Professor Blogs Network has ceased publication of this blog.

Osborne and the Right to Post-conviction DNA Testing (II)

Posted on June 21, 2009
On November 8, 2008, I outlined the issues in the Osborne case that the Supreme Court decided a few days ago (June 18, 2009). The Court avoided the core issue of whether a prisoner has a right to be released...

Taking Liberties with the Numbers

Posted on April 18, 2009
This month's issue of the California Lawyer perpetuates the confusion in the media about DNA database trawls. In an article entitled "Guilt by the Numbers: How Fuzzy is the Math that Makes DNA Evidence Look So Compelling to Jurors?," award-winning...

Two Cases on Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

Posted on April 16, 2009
A diagnosis that is presented in courts with some regularity is "multiple chemical sensitivity." Wikipedia provides the following links and remarks about its dubious scientific status: "Because of the lack of scientific evidence based on well-controlled clinical trials that supports...

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Genetic Datasets to Stay Closed

Posted on March 07, 2009
"The National Human Genome Research Institute is sticking with a decision, made last summer, to remove free-access, pooled genomics data [from] the Internet." An article in the American Scientist implies that one reason for the decision is that "law enforcement...

McDaniel v. Brown: The Supreme Court, Bayes' Theorem, Five Brothers, and Two Errors in DNA Probabilities

Posted on March 07, 2009
At the end of January, the Supreme Court granted a petition for the writ of certiorari in McDaniel v. Brown. I noted this case back in May 2008. In Brown v. Farwell, 525 F.3d 787 (9th Cir. 2008), as the...

Viewing the National Academy Report on Forensic Science

Posted on February 19, 2009
The National Academy of Science has been generating a lot of reports recently on forensic science topics. Its latest, long-delayed, long-awaited effort is the most ambitious. It surveys all fields of forensic science and calls for dramatic reforms in the...

Simpley neurology

Posted on November 22, 2008
Around the 1950s, psychiatry and law was in vogue. Today, we are hearing a lot about neurology and law. In the spirit of Jay Leno's "Headlines," here is an advertisement from the Oxford University Press catalog: Neurology Second Edition Michael...

Osborne and the Right to Post-conviction DNA Testing

Posted on November 07, 2008
The Supreme Court will consider whether an individual convicted of a crime has a constitutional right to obtain a DNA sample that might exonerate him. The case that raises this issue has produced four appellate opinions so far. The one...

Genetics Datasets Closed Due to Forensic DNA Discovery

Posted on September 05, 2008
Until last Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other groups had posted large amounts of aggregate human DNA data for easy access to researchers around the world. On Aug. 25, however, NIH removed the aggregate files of individual...

Hot Tubbing: Old Wine in New Bottles for Expert Witnesses

Posted on August 11, 2008
The New York Times has discovered that expert witnesses retained by parties often are partisan. This certainly is fit to print, but is it news? Not to anyone who has been reading law reviews and opinions written during the past...

The Birthday Problem in Las Vegas

Posted on August 11, 2008
The other week, an editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal misconstrued the now infamous 2001 findings of partial matches in the Arizona DNA database. The study was discussed on our blog on July 20, and I won't repeat the explanation...

Fingerprints' Chemical "Footprints"?

Posted on August 08, 2008
Today's New York Times reports a story that appears in this week's Science. According to the Times, "With a new analytical technique, a fingerprint can now reveal much more than the identity of a person. It can now also identify...

DNA database woes and the birthday problem

Posted on July 20, 2008
The Los Angeles Times has reported that "A discovery leads to questions about whether the odds of people sharing genetic profiles are sometimes higher than portrayed. Calling the finding meaningless, the FBI has sought to block such inquiry." Actually, the...

The Psychology of Fuel Efficiency

Posted on June 25, 2008
A recent discussion started by John Lynch on the Society for Judgment and Decisionmaking listserv focuses on an interesting new article by Larrick and Soll in Science, entitled the "MPG Illusion." The paper reemphasizes the point that statistical metrics matter...

The persuasive power of neuroscience

Posted on June 24, 2008
The March issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience contains an article stimulated by the frequent appearance of news stories announcing the latest brain signature -- for love, aggression, greed, lying, etc. A group of researchers at Yale decided to...

Rounding Up the Usual Suspects III: People v. Nelson

Posted on June 22, 2008
On April 5, 2008, I mentioned People v. Nelson, 48 Cal.Rptr.3d 399 (Ct. App. 3 Dist. 2006), rev. granted, 147 P.3d 1011 (Cal. 2006), as a leading case on the admissibility of the various probabilities associated with cold hits in...

The Transposition Fallacy in the Los Angeles Times

Posted on June 08, 2008
In an earlier posting, I noted a story in the Los Angeles Times about the perceived need to adjust the probability for a random match when an individual emerges as a suspect because of a trawl through a database of...

fMRI, Lie Detection, and Statistics

Posted on June 05, 2008
I'm blogging from the AALS Mid-Year Conference on Evidence in Cleveland, where I just moderated a discussion this morning on fMRI and Lie Detection featuring Steve Laken (Cephos Corp.) and Mike Pardo (Alabama). Although the studies on fMRI lie detection...

The Transposition Fallacy in Brown v. Farwell

Posted on May 30, 2008
Earlier this month, Ninth Circuit held in Brown v. Farwell, No. 07-15592 (9th Cir. May 5, 2008) that a prisoner was denied due process of law because of a mistake involving DNA evidence. Troy Brown had been tried and convicted...

False Confession Testimony

Posted on May 23, 2008
I participated on an interesting panel on the admissibility of psychological testimony concerning false confessions at the New York City Bar last night. Conventional wisdom, of course, is that no one would ever confess to a crime that they did...

Reproducible Analyses

Posted on May 17, 2008
John Cook has an interesting discussion about the problem of reproducing statistical analyses here. (Thanks to Andrew Gelman for the link). The problem is this: even given the same dataset, statistical analyses are often difficult to replicate for a variety...

The Trouble with Forensics

Posted on May 16, 2008
Roger Koppl has a very nice piece in Forbes discussing the gap between the perceived power of forensic science and its reality. See Here. He sketches potential reforms, all of which are sensible and relatively easily accomplished. The value of...

My brother's DNA: Near-miss DNA searching

Posted on May 06, 2008
California has adopted an aggressive policy toward near-miss DNA searching -- something discussed in this blog before. The state is going to compare DNA profiles recovered from crime-scenes to those in its offender database (1) to see if there are...

Rounding Up the Usual Suspects II

Posted on May 05, 2008
Not long ago, I mentioned the DNA-database-trawl issue that has led to several confused court opinions. The evidentiary issue is whether a complete search through a database of DNA profiles that produces one and only one match is less probative...

Ghostwriting in Medical Journals

Posted on April 17, 2008
The Journal of the American Medical Assocation (JAMA) recently published a study discussing the disturbing practice of ghostwriting in medical journal articles -- in this case, involving Vioxx. The JAMA article is here. A related New York Times article can...

Low copy number DNA vindicated?

Posted on April 11, 2008
In January, we noted the unusual opinion of the trial court in the Omagh bombing case. Now, a second review of the Forensic Science Service's procedure for amplifying small quantities of DNA has appeared. According to an article in Guardian,...

Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Posted on April 06, 2008
Countries around the world have established databases consisting of the DNA profiles of suspected or convicted offenders. In the United States, state and federal databases combined in the FBI's National DNA Index System hold over five million convicted offender DNA...

Low Copy Number DNA Dealt a Low Blow?

Posted on January 14, 2008
Twenty-nine people died and 200 were wounded when a 255-kilogram car bomb exploded in a busy shopping area. No, this was not Baghdad or Jerusalem. It was Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1998. The bomb was the work of splinter group...

"Predictive Medical Information" in DNA Databases for Law Enforcement

Posted on November 30, 2007
One objection to amassing databases of DNA profiles for law enforcement purposes is that the profiles themselves contain "predictive medical information." E.g., Joh (2006). The average person might take this to mean that the profiles used for identification also reveal...

Additional Thoughts on Maryland v. Rose (Fingerprints)

Posted on October 26, 2007
Having just read the opinion in Maryland v. Rose, my initial reaction is an odd mixture of yawns and gasps. On the unreliability of fingerprints, the opinion is in many ways completely unremarkable. The arguments offered against fingerprints have now...

And more on Fingerprints....

Posted on October 26, 2007
Here's a follow-up story on Judge Souder's exclusion of fingerprints for not being based on "a reliable factual foundation." See Here. There are some insightful comments from Sandy Zabell and some not-terribly-insightful comments from Thomas P. Mauriello, an adjunct professor...

Exclusion of Fingerprint Evidence

Posted on October 25, 2007
A Maryland trial court excluded the State's proffer of partial latent fingerprint evidence last Friday. The judge based her ruling on the State's failure to demonstrate that the technology produced valid results. Although the court used the Frye test, the...

Wall Street Journal law blog blooper on court size

Posted on July 16, 2007
The author of the Wall Street Journal law blog brought up an old hobby horse -- splitting the Ninth Circuit. Ashby Jones, reporting on some calculations (of dubious applicability) in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by law professor...

Bush Science

Posted on July 11, 2007
Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona told a congressional committee that the Bush administration pressured him to change, modify, or omit information regarding public health matters based on political considerations. See Here. Nothing new, perhaps, but worth adding to the list...

The "prosecutor's fallacy" in the Netherlands

Posted on May 17, 2007
A New York Times blog by Mark Buchanan on "The Prosecutor's Fallacy" provides a report on a conviction involving flawed statistical evidence. (The author also described the case in January in Nature. A more detailed analysis is at Richard Gill's...

The Meaning of Error

Posted on April 24, 2007
I am sitting at a meeting of a National Academy of Science Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Science Community. Forensic scientists addressing the committee have said that it is not a "false positive" or not an "error"...

Predicting Dangerousness and Flipping Coins

Posted on April 20, 2007
On April 20, NPR's Morning Edition broadcast an interview with Phillip Merideth, "a forensic psychiatrist and the chief medical office for Brentwood Behavioral Healthcare in Mississippi [and] a lawyer who teaches about mental health and the law." According to Dr...