OIG Report
Definition
The US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report (March 2006) that analysed the Mayfield misidentification, identifying three procedural failures: non-sequential comparison, no stopping rule, and open verification.
- Issuing body
- US DOJ Office of the Inspector General
- Date
- March 2006
- Subject
- Brandon Mayfield fingerprint misidentification
- Failures identified
- Non-sequential comparison, no stopping rule, open verification
Common questions
What was the practical effect of the OIG report's findings?+
It became a widely cited case study in fingerprint error analysis, prompting reform proposals such as blind verification and linear ACE-V documentation to prevent examiners from being influenced by a prior conclusion.
What does "no stopping rule" mean in this context?+
It refers to the absence of a defined point at which an examiner must stop searching for corroborating features once a match is suspected, which can let confirmation bias drive the analysis toward the initial candidate.
Related terms
- ACE-V
- Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, Verification: the four-stage method for latent print examination used by accredited forensic fingerprint laboratories. Analysis examines the latent in...
- Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 (BSA)
- India's current evidence statute, which replaced the Indian Evidence Act 1872. Section 63 of the BSA governs electronic records and requires a...
- Blind Verification
- The procedure in which a second fingerprint examiner independently performs the Analysis and Comparison stages without knowledge of the first examiner's conclusion....
- CFSL
- Central Forensic Science Laboratory: a central government lab operating under DFSS. India has CFSLs at New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Pune, Guwahati,...
- Confirmation Bias
- The cognitive tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or...
- IAFIS
- Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System; the US FBI's national fingerprint database. Generates candidate lists ranked by similarity score; the final identification decision...
- PCAST Report (2016)
- The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology 2016 report on forensic science that found firearms mark analysis had not yet...
- Perseverance Bias
- The tendency to maintain a committed conclusion in the face of contradictory evidence. Implicated in the SCRO examiners' insistence on the McKie...
- Sequential Unmasking
- An information-sequencing protocol in which the examiner receives the questioned material first, completes and documents the analysis before receiving the known standards,...