ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Validity of forensic cartridge-case comparisons.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Assessing the foundations of forensic identification evidence: A critical examination of proficiency test design and results.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The Hawthorne effect in studies of firearm and toolmark examiners.Journal of forensic sciences · 2025Article
- What are "fair" prior odds of guilt in criminal cases?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reply to Rosenblum et al. and Carriquiry and Ommen: Understanding probative value, triers-of-fact, and usefulness of validity study results.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Incorrect statistical reasoning in Guyll et al. leads to biased claims about strength of forensic evidence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Inconclusive decisions and error rates in forensic science.Forensic science international. Synergy · 2024Article
- Scientific guidelines for evaluating the validity of forensic feature-comparison methods.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The secret life of crime labs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This article presents key findings from a research project that evaluated the validity and probative value of cartridge-case comparisons under field-based conditions. Decisions provided by 228 trained firearm examiners across the US showed that forensic cartridge-case comparison is characterized by low error rates. However, inconclusive decisions constituted over one-fifth of all decisions rendered, complicating evaluation of the technique's ability to yield unambiguously correct decisions. Specifically, restricting evaluation to only the conclusive decisions of identification and elimination yielded true-positive and true-negative rates exceeding 99%, but incorporating inconclusives caused these values to drop to 93.4% and 63.5%, respectively. The asymmetric effect on the two rates occurred because inconclusive decisions were rendered six times more frequently for different-source than same-source comparisons. Considering probative value, which is a decision's usefulness for determining a comparison's ground-truth state, conclusive decisions predicted their corresponding ground-truth states with near perfection. Likelihood ratios (LRs) further showed that conclusive decisions greatly increase the odds of a comparison's ground-truth state matching the ground-truth state asserted by the decision. Inconclusive decisions also possessed probative value, predicting different-source status and having a LR indicating that they increase the odds of different-source status. The study also manipulated comparison difficulty by using two firearm models that produce dissimilar cartridge-case markings. The model chosen for being more difficult received more inconclusive decisions for same-source comparisons, resulting in a lower true-positive rate compared to the less difficult model. Relatedly, inconclusive decisions for the less difficult model exhibited more probative value, being more strongly predictive of different-source status.
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