Law Commons^™

During the Symposium for the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, held at Boston College on October 27, 2017, the scientists, statisticians, legal academics, and criminal defense lawyers presented a unified theme: the federal courts have not fulfilled their role as gatekeepers to exclude or limit potentially unreliable feature-comparison methods of forensic science evidence (“FCM evidence”). The only voiced dissents came from the DOJ and FBI lawyers, who argued that the courts had been admitting such pattern-matching evidence properly and that the evidence was indeed reliable.