Apply our Research in Practice
Individuals in the courtroom, including judges, attorneys, and jury members, are challenged with interpreting the probabilistic evidence provided by new forensic methods. CSAFE is committed to providing up-to-date training to allow the legal community to fairly evaluate and communicate forensic conclusions. Judges, who under Daubert have the role of gate-keepers for the science that gets admitted into evidence in federal (and many) state courts, need specific knowledge to make appropriate decisions on matters of admissibility and expert testimony and to guide jurors in their deliberations when complex technical evidence is presented at trial.
Through collaborations with other national agencies, CSAFE provides legal education offerings at the intersection of forensics, statistics, and law –– both online and in-person –– to promote quantitative literacy among the legal community. Check back regularly for new offerings, and please contact us with any interest in educational collaborations or with questions.
Upcoming Events
Registration is now open for these events.
Webinar: Improving Forensic Decision Making: a Human-Cognitive Perspective
Thursday, February 17 at 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CSTIntroduction to Statistical Thinking for Judges
In the second edition of the Science Bench Book for Judges, a new section written by CSAFE researchers helps explain some of the common concepts used in statistical analysis. Judges will gain an understanding of the basics, including populations and samples, before moving on to different types of data that might arise in legal proceedings.
Available Resources
For the Legal Community
Found 132 Results
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Using Mixture Models to Examine Group Differences: An Illustration Involving the Perceived Strength of Forensic Science Evidence
Type: Webinar Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice,Training and Education
This CSAFE webinar was held on December 9, 2021. Presenter: Naomi Kaplan-Damary, PhD The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Presentation Description: Forensic examiners compare items to assess whether they originate from a common source. In reaching conclusions, they consider the probability…
Treatment of inconclusives in the AFTE range of conclusions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Firearms and Toolmarks
Published: 2021 | By: Heike Hofmann
In the past decade, and in response to the recommendations set forth by the National Research Council Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Sciences Community (2009), scientists have conducted several black-box studies that attempt to estimate the error…
Assessing the resources and requirements of statistics education in forensic science
Type: Poster Research Area(s): Training and Education
Published: 2020 | By: Xiaoyi Yang
With the increasing ability to easily collect and analyze data, statistics plays a more critical role in scientific research activities, such as designing experiments, controlling processes, and understanding or validating lab results. As a result, incorporating statistics training into the…
Commentary on Curley et al. Assessing cognitive bias in forensic decisions: a review and outlook
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Latent Print
Published: 2020 | By: William C. Thompson
In their recent critical review titled “Assessing Cognitive Bias in Forensic Decisions: A Review and Outlook,” Curley et al. (1) offer a confused and incomplete discussion of “task relevance” in forensic science. Their failure to adopt a clear and appropriate…
Judges and forensic science education: A national survey
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2021 | By: Brandon L. Garrett
In criminal cases, forensic science reports and expert testimony play an increasingly important role in adjudication. More states now follow a federal reliability standard, which calls upon judges to assess the reliability and validity of scientific evidence. Little is known…
Science Bench Book for Judges: Section 4 Introduction to Statistical Thinking for Judges
Type: Book Chapter Research Area(s):
Published: 2020 | By: Alicia Carriquiry
Alicia Carriquiry, the director of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), and Eryn Blagg, a doctoral student in statistics at Iowa State University, wrote a section on statistics for the newly released second edition of the…
Judges and forensic science education: A national survey
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2021 | By: Brandon L. Garrett
In criminal cases, forensic science reports and expert testimony play an increasingly important role in adjudication. More states now follow a federal reliability standard, which calls upon judges to assess the reliability and validity of scientific evidence. Little is known…
Juror appraisals of forensic evidence: Effects of blind proficiency and cross-examination
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: William E. Crozier
Forensic testimony plays a crucial role in many criminal cases, with requests to crime laboratories steadily increasing. As part of efforts to improve the reliability of forensic evidence, scientific and policy groups increasingly recommend routine and blind proficiency tests of…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling for the forensic evaluation of handwritten documents
Type: Dissertation,Publication Research Area(s): Handwriting
Published: 2020 | By: Amy Crawford
The analysis of handwritten evidence has been used widely in courts in the United States since the 1930s (Osborn, 1946). Traditional evaluations are conducted by trained forensic examiners. More recently, there has been a movement toward objective and probability-based evaluation…
Mock Jurors’ Evaluation of Firearm Examiner Testimony
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Brandon L. Garrett
Objectives: Firearms experts traditionally have testified that a weapon leaves “unique” toolmarks, so bullets or cartridge casings can be visually examined and conclusively matched to a particular firearm. Recently, due to scientific critiques, Department of Justice policy, and judges’ rulings,…
Mock Juror Perceptions of Forensics
Type: Webinar Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice,Training and Education
This CSAFE Center Wide webinar was presented on December 8, 2020 by: Brandon Garrett – L. Neil Williams Professor of Law, Faculty Director at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice Nicholas Scurich – Associate Professor of Criminology, Law &…
A Pioneer in Forensic Science Reform: The Work of Paul Giannelli
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2018 | By: Brandon Garrett
Few can say, "I told you so," to our entire criminal justice system. Being right about what is wrong with the use of evidence in criminal cases is not a bad thing, but being able to influence the growing response…
Probabilistic Reporting in Criminal Cases in the United States: A Baseline Study
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Simon Cole
Forensic evidence reporting shows a high degree of adherence to prevailing disciplinary standards. Probabilistic reporting of forensic results remains rare. Probabilistic reports were mostly subjective verbal assignments of posterior probabilities.
Statistical methods for digital image forensics: Algorithm mismatch for blind spatial steganalysis and score-based likelihood ratios for camera device identification
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Stephanie Reinders
Forensic science currently faces a variety of challenges. Statistically suitable reference databases need to be developed and maintained. Subjective methods that can introduce bias need to be replaced by objective methods. Highly technical forensic methods need to be clearly and…
Open Forensic Science in R
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2019 | By: Samantha Tyner
This book is for anyone looking to do forensic science analysis in a data-driven and open way. Whether you are a student, teacher, or scientist, this book is for you. We take the latest research, primarily from the Center for Statistics and…
Statistical Methods for the Forensic Analysis of User-Event Data
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Chris Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originate from the same source or from different sources. Statistical approaches to addressing this question have been widely adopted within the forensics community, particularly for DNA evidence, providing…
Hunting wild stego images, a domain adaptation problem in digital image forensics
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Li Lin
Digital image forensics is a field encompassing camera identication, forgery detection and steganalysis. Statistical modeling and machine learning have been successfully applied in the academic community of this maturing field. Still, large gaps exist between academic results and applications used…
How Can a Forensic Result Be a ‘Decision’? A Critical Analysis of Ongoing Reforms of Forensic Reporting Formats for Federal Examiners
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Simon A. Cole
The decade since the publication of the 2009 National Research Council report on forensic science has seen the increasing use of a new word to describe forensic results. What were once called “facts,” “determinations,” “conclusions,” or “opinions,” are increasingly described…
Quantifying the similarity of 2D images using edge pixels: An application to the forensic comparison of footwear impressions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
We propose a novel method to quantify the similarity between an impression (Q) from an unknown source and a test impression (K) from a known source. Using the property of geometrical congruence in the impressions, the degree of correspondence is…
Quantifying the similarity of 2D images using edge pixels: An application to the forensic comparison of footwear impressions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
We propose a novel method to quantify the similarity between an impression (Q) from an unknown source and a test impression (K) from a known source. Using the property of geometrical congruence in the impressions, the degree of correspondence is…
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