Simon A. Cole

The vision in “blind” justice: Expert perception, judgment, and visual cognition in forensic pattern recognition.

Many forensic disciplines require experts to judge whether two complex patterns are sufficiently similar to conclude that both originate from the same source. Studies in this area have revealed that there are a number of factors that affect perception and judgment and that decisions are subjective and susceptible to extraneous influences (such as emotional context, expectation, and motivation). Some studies have shown that the same expert examiner, examining the same prints but within different contexts, may reach different and contradictory decisions. However, such effects are not always present; some examiners seem more susceptible to such influences than do others—especially when the pattern matching is “hard to call” and when the forensic experts are not aware that they are being observed in an experimental study. Studying forensic examiners can contribute to our understanding of expertise and decision making, as well as have implications for forensic science and other areas of expertise.

Science and Technology Studies on Trial: Dilemmas of Expertise

This paper discusses materials from a legal case, People v. Hyatt (2001). This was a criminal case in which one of the authors (Simon Cole) agreed to appear as an expert witness for the defense. Cole’s expertise derived from his research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and so his appearance in the case exemplified STS research engaging in a public controversy about a contested form of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Cole’s STS work and his testimony proved useful to defendants seeking to restrict the admissibility of forensic fingerprint evidence in court, but before he could testify in the Hyatt trial, his own expertise was subjected to an admissibility hearing. During his testimony, Cole faced a number of dilemmas as he attempted to accommodate his own conception of science and STS with the terms and procedures recognized by the court. The hearing was transcribed, and the coauthors of this paper discussed the details of the transcript. Their discussion itself was recorded and transcribed, and portions of the two transcripts are juxtaposed in this paper. The paper discusses Cole’s difficulties and the dilemmas they exemplify, as a situated demonstration of some of the difficulties STS scholars face in their attempts to engage the ‘public sphere’.

On the preliminary psychophysics of fingerprint identification

For a century, the matching of images of fingerprints has been used for forensic identification. Despite that history, there have been no published, peer-reviewed studies directly examining the extent to which people can correctly match fingerprints to one another. The results of three experiments using naïve undergraduates to match images of fingerprints are reported. The results demonstrate that people can identify fingerprints quite well, and that matching accuracy can vary as a function of both source finger type and image similarity.

The ‘Opinionization’ of Fingerprint Evidence

Perhaps the seminal moment in the now celebrated Shirley McKie fingerprint misidentification case that has preoccupied Scotland from 1997 until the present came in 2002 when Justice Minister Jim Wallace told the press that a fingerprint identification is ‘not an exact science’ (BBC News, 2002a). Shirley McKie, an officer in the Strathclyde Police Department, had been assigned to investigate the murder of Marion Ross at her home in Kilmarnock. McKie was not authorized to enter the crime scene, and she denied that she did. But four Scottish Criminal Records Office (SCRO) latent print examiners identified her as the source of a latent print found on a doorframe inside the house. A builder named David Asbury was eventually convicted of the crime, based primarily on the latent print evidence. With the Asbury conviction hinging on the latent print evidence, McKie was eventually charged with perjury. McKie sought assistance from other experts, and a British examiner and two American examiners concluded that she was not the source of the print. The same experts and others later concluded that the identification of Asbury, made by the same four SCRO experts, was also false, and his convictionwas quashed (Jofre, 2002).McKie was acquitted, but her and her father’s demands for investigations, apologies and compensation from the government have embroiled Scotland in what is now a decade-long scandal that shows few signs of abating (McKie and Russell, 2007). Wallace’s remark prompted widespread outrage. One member of Scottish Parliament called Wallace ‘scientifically illiterate’, said his remark was ‘the forensic equivalent of the flat earth theory’ (BBC News, 2002a), and said that he had turned Scottish justice into ‘a laughing stock throughout the world’ (BBC News, 2002b). Critics of the government read Wallace’s remark as an exercise in scandal management, a cynical attempt to minimize or even excuse the apparent incompetence, and perhaps even malfeasance, on the part of the Scottish Criminal Records Office. Members of the community of latent print practitioners, on the other hand, read the remark as a direct attack onwhatwas perhaps their most cherished epistemic artifact: the perceived ‘facticity’ of fingerprint identifications. A British latent print examiner replied ‘It is not opinion. It’s a fact in black and white. Either it is or it isn’t or it’s inconclusive, nothing else’ (BBC News, 2002b). However, Wallace’s remark may also be read as an understandable response to the epistemological trap in which he found himself. This trap was composed primarily of the extraordinarily strong epistemological claims—to ‘facticity’, to ‘reliability’ and even

A surfeit of science: The “CSI effect” and the media appropriation of the public understanding of science

Over the past decade, popular media has promulgated claims that the television program CSI and its spinoffs and imitators have had a pernicious effect on the public understanding of forensic science, the so-called “CSI effect.” This paper analyzes those media claims by documenting the ways in which the media claims that CSI “distorts” an imagined “reality.” It shows that the media appropriated the analytic stance usually adopted by science advocates, portraying the CSI effect as a social problem in science communication. This appropriation was idiosyncratic in that it posited, as a social problem, a “surfeit” of knowledge and positive imagery about science, rather than the more familiar “deficits.” In addition, the media simultaneously appropriated both “traditional” and “critical” PUS discourses. Despite this apparent contradiction, the paper concludes that, in both discourses, the media and its expert informants insist upon their hegemony over “the public” to articulate the “reality” of forensic science.

How much justice can technology afford? The impact of DNA technology on equal criminal justice

New technology is changing the administration of criminal justice. Among the most prominent of such changes is the development of forensic DNA technology, which includes a forensic assay with potentially enormous discrimination and sensitivity and the development of large databases based on that assay. This article considers the likely impact of DNA technology on the race, class, and gender inequalities that are acknowledged facets of the American criminal justice system. The article focuses on two major consequences of the development of DNA technology: the increasing, though still modest, reliance on DNA recovered from scenes to investigate crimes; and the rise of large criminal identification databases based on genetic profiles. It is often suggested that DNA is an egalitarian technology that will have a leveling effect on criminal justice administration. Although DNA technology does mitigate inequality in some cases, it may also exacerbate inequality in less obvious ways. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Forensic bitemark identification: weak foundations, exaggerated claims

Abstract Several forensic sciences, especially of the pattern-matching kind, are increasingly seen to lack the scientific foundation needed to justify continuing admission as trial evidence. Indeed, several have been abolished in the recent past. A likely next candidate for elimination is bitemark identification. A number of DNA exonerations have occurred in recent years for individuals convicted based on erroneous bitemark identifications. Intense scientific and legal scrutiny has resulted. An important National Academies review found little scientific support for the field. The Texas Forensic Science Commission recently recommended a moratorium on the admission of bitemark expert testimony. The California Supreme Court has a case before it that could start a national dismantling of forensic odontology. This article describes the (legal) basis for the rise of bitemark identification and the (scientific) basis for its impending fall. The article explains the general logic of forensic identification, the claims of bitemark identification, and reviews relevant empirical research on bitemark identification—highlighting both the lack of research and the lack of support provided by what research does exist. The rise and possible fall of bitemark identification evidence has broader implications—highlighting the weak scientific culture of forensic science and the laws difficulty in evaluating and responding to unreliable and unscientific evidence.

Do Androids Pulverize Tiger Bones to Use as Aphrodisiacs

On Uncompahgre and Red Cloud Peaks in the San Juan mountains of Colorado, the Uncompahgre fritillary butterfly is becoming extinct. The Uncompahgre fritillary never should have been there in the first place. The climate was perfectly habitable 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age, but the butterfly failed to retreat with the glaciers and ended up trapped in the mountains, thousands of miles from its proper arctic climate. Facing several consecutive years of warm weather, the butterfly has steadily climbed the mountain in search of cooler climes. Now it has reached the

Double Helix Jeopardy

DNA database help solve crimes but aid and abet racial discrimination. An arrest-only database would have the look and feel of a universal DNA database for black males. Although the DNA-database debate will probably occupy judges, legal scholars, and legislators for some time, the most likely outcome is the least equitable-including only arrestees. Indeed, if policy-makers were purposefully trying to find the most discriminatory system possible, an arrestee database would be the ideal choice.

Connoisseurship All the Way Down: Art Authentication, Forgery, Fingerprint Identification, Expert Knowledge

How do you know whether a painting is really painted by a particular person, or a fingerprint is made by a particular finger? You ask an expert. But, in the case of the painting, what kind of expert should you trust?1 An art historian, a forensic art expert, or a fingerprint examiner with expertise in detecting fingerprint forgeries? This question has been raised in disputes over art authentication since as early as the 1930s.2 An engaging article by David Grann (2010) in the New Yorker updated a story that I have been following and writing about for several years that raises interesting questions about the production and evaluation of expert knowledge.3