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Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Litigation

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Full-Text Articles in Other Statistics and Probability

Firearms And Toolmark Error Rates, Susan Vanderplas, Kori Khan, Heike Hofmann, Alicia L. Carriquiry Jan 2022

Firearms And Toolmark Error Rates, Susan Vanderplas, Kori Khan, Heike Hofmann, Alicia L. Carriquiry

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

We have outlined several problems with the state of error rate studies on firearm and toolmark examination. Fundamentally, we do not know what the error rate is for these types of comparisons. This is a failure of the scientific study of toolmarks, rather than the examiners themselves, but until this is corrected with multiple studies that meet the criteria described in Section 3, we cannot support the use of this evidence in criminal proceedings.