Articlehybrid2022

Accuracy of comparison decisions by forensic firearms examiners

Keith L. Monson · Erich D. Smith · Eugene M. Peters

46 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Forensic Sciences

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Reliability and Agreement in Measurement Legal processes and jurisprudence Scientific Measurement and Uncertainty Evaluation

Abstract

This black box study assessed the performance of forensic firearms examiners in the United States. It involved three different types of firearms and 173 volunteers who performed a total of 8640 comparisons of both bullets and cartridge cases. The overall false-positive error rate was estimated as 0.656% and 0.933% for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively, while the rate of false negatives was estimated as 2.87% and 1.87% for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively. The majority of errors were made by a limited number of examiners. Because chi-square tests of independence strongly suggest that error probabilities are not the same for each examiner, these are maximum-likelihood estimates based on the beta-binomial probability model and do not depend on an assumption of equal examiner-specific error rates. Corresponding 95% confidence intervals are (0.305%, 1.42%) and (0.548%, 1.57%) for false positives for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively, and (1.89%, 4.26%) and (1.16%, 2.99%) for false negatives for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively. The results of this study are consistent with prior studies, despite its comprehensive design and challenging specimens.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

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

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

References

2011Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions 2020(Mis)use of scientific measurements in forensic science 2018“Cannot Decide”: The Fine Line Between Appropriate Inconclusive Determinations Versus Unjustifiably Deciding Not To Decide 2007Defending the Scientific Foundations of the Firearms and Tool Mark Identification Discipline: Responding to Recent Challenges 2001The real “Hawthorne effect”2019Validity and reliability of forensic firearm examiners 2014A Study of False-Positive and False-Negative Error Rates in Cartridge Case Comparisons 2021Forensic science and the principle of excluded middle: “Inconclusive” decisions and the structure of error rate studies

Cited by

2023Validity of forensic cartridge-case comparisons 2023Repeatability and reproducibility of comparison decisions by firearms examiners 2024Methodological problems in every black-box study of forensic firearm comparisons 2023Scientific guidelines for evaluating the validity of forensic feature-comparison methods 2023Shining a Light on Forensic Black-Box Studies

Explore the map →

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

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.