2009 NAS Report
Definition
The National Academy of Sciences report Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States, which found that fingerprint individualization claims lacked empirical population-frequency validation, that the categorical zero-error-rate claim was unsupported, and that structural bias management was needed. The primary catalyst for post-2009 statistical reform in fingerprint examination.
- Full title
- Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States
- Publisher
- US National Academy of Sciences
- Key finding
- No empirical population-frequency validation for fingerprint claims
- Impact
- Catalyst for post-2009 statistical reform in fingerprints
Common questions
What specific fingerprint claim did the report challenge?+
It challenged the traditional claim of a categorical zero error rate in fingerprint identification, concluding that this claim lacked empirical support and that error rates had not been rigorously established.
What changed in fingerprint examination practice after the report?+
Statistical and likelihood-ratio based approaches such as FRStat gained traction, and laboratories increasingly adopted structured bias-management procedures rather than relying purely on subjective individualization conclusions.
Related terms
- Categorical Identification
- The historical fingerprint testimony model in which the examiner declares that the latent print originated from the named person to the exclusion...
- ENFSI Evaluative Reporting Framework
- The ENFSI Guideline for Evaluative Reporting in Forensic Science (2015), which specifies that forensic identification opinions should be expressed as likelihood ratios...
- FRStat
- The fingerprint statistical scoring model developed by the FBI Laboratory and Iowa State University (Professor Alicia Carriquiry). Takes ACE-V comparison documentation as...
- Likelihood Ratio (LR)
- The ratio of two conditional probabilities: the probability of the observed evidence given the prosecution's hypothesis (same source), divided by the probability...
- NIST ELFT-EFS (2012)
- The NIST Evaluation of Latent Fingerprint Technologies: Extended Feature Sets, a large-scale evaluation of both automated AFIS algorithms and human examiner performance....
- Population Frequency Database
- The reference dataset from which the denominator of a fingerprint likelihood ratio is estimated: the frequency with which a given configuration of...
- R V. T (2010)
- UK Court of Appeal decision on footwear evidence likelihood ratios that expressed caution about numerical LR presentation where the underlying database was...
- Ulery Et Al. 2011
- The FBI black-box study that tested 169 fingerprint examiners on 744 latent-exemplar pairs, finding a false-positive rate of 0.1%. The study empirically...
- Verbal Scale
- The ENFSI translation of numerical likelihood ratios into courtroom language: very strong support (LR over 10,000), strong support (LR 1,000-10,000), moderate support...