Editorial: Statistics and forensic science

Abstract

Forensic science is usually taken to mean the application of a broad spectrum of scientific tools to answer questions of interest to the legal system. Despite such popular television series as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spinoffs--CSI: Miami and CSI: New York--on which the forensic scientists use the latest high-tech scientific tools to identify the perpetrator of a crime and always in under an hour, forensic science is under assault, in the public media, popular magazines [Talbot (2007), Toobin (2007)] and in the scientific literature [Kennedy (2003), Saks and Koehler (2005)]. Ironically, this growing controversy over forensic science has occurred precisely at the time that DNA evidence has become the ``gold standard'' in the courts, leading to the overturning of hundreds of convictions many of which were based on clearly less credible forensic evidence, including eyewitness testimony [Berger (2006)].Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS140 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org