Ulery 2011 Study
Definition
Ulery et al. (2011), 'Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions,' PNAS 108(19): 7733-7738; the largest empirical black-box study of fingerprint examiner performance, finding a 0.1% false-positive rate and a 7.5% false-negative rate across 169 examiners and 744 comparison pairs.
- Citation
- Ulery et al., PNAS 108(19): 7733-7738, 2011
- Title
- Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions
- Scale
- 169 examiners, 744 comparison pairs
- False-positive rate
- 0.1 percent
- False-negative rate
- 7.5 percent
Common questions
Why is the Ulery 2011 study cited so often in fingerprint admissibility challenges?+
It was the largest controlled black-box study of practicing examiners at the time, giving courts and litigants an actual measured false-positive and false-negative rate to weigh against the profession's historical claims of zero error, which directly bears on Daubert-style reliability arguments.
How does the 7.5 percent false-negative rate differ in importance from the 0.1 percent false-positive rate?+
A false positive wrongly links an innocent person to a crime scene and carries severe consequences for that individual, while a false negative simply misses a potentially useful identification, so courts and critics have focused heavily on the false-positive figure even though the false-negative rate is far higher.
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