Editorial: Statistics and forensic science
Abstract
Forensic science is usually taken to mean the application of a broad spectrum of scientific tools to answer questions of interest to the legal system. Despite such popular television series as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spinoffs--CSI: Miami and CSI: New York--on which the forensic scientists use the latest high-tech scientific tools to identify the perpetrator of a crime and always in under an hour, forensic science is under assault, in the public media, popular magazines [Talbot (2007), Toobin (2007)] and in the scientific literature [Kennedy (2003), Saks and Koehler (2005)]. Ironically, this growing controversy over forensic science has occurred precisely at the time that DNA evidence has become the ``gold standard'' in the courts, leading to the overturning of hundreds of convictions many of which were based on clearly less credible forensic evidence, including eyewitness testimony [Berger (2006)].
Cite
@article{arxiv.0712.0974,
title = {Editorial: Statistics and forensic science},
author = {Stephen E. Fienberg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0712.0974},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS140 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)