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: Blind Testing in Firearms Examination
Thursday, June 23 at 11:00 am - 12:00 pm CDTIntroduction 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 142 Results
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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…
A database of two-dimensional images of footwear outsole impressions
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
Footwear outsole images were obtained from 150 pairs of used shoes. The motivation for constructing the database was to enable a statistical analysis of two-dimensional (2D) images of shoe outsoles, to understand within shoe (between replicate images of the same…
Statistical Methods for the Forensic Analysis of Geolocated Event Data
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2020 | By: Christopher Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originated 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. Here…
Statistical methods for the forensic analysis of geolocated event data
Type: Publication Research Area(s):
Published: 2020 | By: Chris Galbraith
A common question in forensic analysis is whether two observed data sets originated 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. Here…
Implementation of a Blind Quality Control Program in a Forensic Laboratory
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice,Latent Print
Published: 2019 | By: Callan Hund
A blind quality control (QC) program was successfully developed and implemented in the Toxicology, Seized Drugs, Firearms, Latent Prints (Processing and Comparison), Forensic Biology, and Multimedia (Digital and Audio/Video) sections at the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC). The program was…
Comparison of three similarity scores for bullet LEA matching
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Firearms and Toolmarks
Published: 2020 | By: Susan VanderPlas
Recent advances in microscopy have made it possible to collect 3D topographic data, enabling more precise virtual comparisons based on the collected 3D data as a supplement to traditional comparison microscopy and 2D photography. Automatic comparison algorithms have been introduced…
Error Rates, Likelihood Ratios, and Jury Evaluation of Forensic Evidence
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Brandon Garrett
Forensic examiners regularly testify in criminal cases, informing the jurors whether crime scene evidence likely came from a source. In this study, we examine the impact of providing jurors with testimony further qualified by error rates and likelihood ratios, for…
The Costs and Benefits of Forensics
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2020 | By: Brandon L. Garrett
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that states can be laboratories for experimentation in law and policy. Disappointingly, however, the actual laboratories that states and local governments run are not a home for experimentation. We do not have adequate…
How do latent print examiners perceive proficiency testing? An analysis of examiner perceptions, performance, and print quality
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Latent Print
Published: 2020 | By: Sharon Kelley
Proficiency testing has the potential to serve several important purposes for crime laboratories and forensic science disciplines. Scholars and other stakeholders, however, have criticized standard proficiency testing procedures since their implementation in laboratories across the United States. Specifically, many experts…
An Exploratory Analysis of Handwriting Features: Investigating Numeric Measurements of Writing That Are Important for Statistical Modeling
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Handwriting
Published: 2019 | By: Amy Crawford
The goal of this presentation is to provide insights into which features of handwritten documents are important for statistical modeling with the task of writer identification and to discuss how these features overlap with features that questioned document examiners typically…
An algorithm to compare two‐dimensional footwear outsole images using maximum cliques and speeded‐up robust feature
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Footwear
Published: 2020 | By: Soyoung Park
Footwear examiners are tasked with comparing an outsole impression (Q) left at a crime scene with an impression (K) from a database or from the suspect's shoe. We propose a method for comparing two shoe outsole impressions that relies on…
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