The use and abuse of the elusive construct of inconclusive decisions

Abstract

Inconclusives1 is an elusive conclusion in any domain, and in particular in the forensic sciences. Until recently, it has been relatively neglected, if not ignored, as it has been viewed incorrectly as a ‘non-decision’ with little implication or importance (in contrast to a decisive conclusion, e.g., a ‘match’ vs. an ‘exclusion’, or a ‘homicide’ vs. an ‘accident’). However, inconclusives is not simply a matter of ‘not to decide’, but actually involves making an important decision to ‘decide not to decide’ (Dror and Langenburg, 2019). Inconclusive decisions have critical implications to casework and error rate studies. In casework, e.g., in fingerprinting, deciding an inconclusive rather than an exclusion may prevent the police from eliminating a suspect from an investigation. In forensic pathology, e.g., deciding that a death is undetermined rather than a homicide may prevent a full police investigation. This may be especially problematic if there is a systematic and disproportional undetermined conclusions when people die while in police custody.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.