Quigley-McBride Adele, Blackall T L
Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 Aug 22;15(9):1145. doi: 10.3390/bs15091145.
Whether forensic disciplines have established foundational validity-sufficient empirical evidence that a method reliably produces a predictable level of performance-has become a question of growing interest among scientists and legal professionals. This paper evaluates the foundational validity of two sources of forensic evidence relied upon in criminal cases: eyewitness identification decisions and latent fingerprint examiners' conclusions. Importantly, establishing foundational validity and estimating accuracy are conceptually and functionally different. Though eyewitnesses can often be mistaken, identification procedures recommended by researchers are grounded in decades of programmatic research that justifies the use of methods that improve the reliability of eyewitness decisions. In contrast, latent print research suggests that expert examiners can be very accurate, but foundational validity in this field is limited by an overreliance on a handful of black-box studies, the dismissal of smaller-scale, yet high-quality, research, and a tendency to treat foundational validity as a fixed destination rather than a continuum. Critically, the lack of a standardized method means that any estimates of examiner performance are not tied to any specific approach to latent print examination. Despite promising early work, until the field adopts and tests well-defined procedures, foundational validity in latent print examination will remain a goal still to be achieved.
法医学科是否已确立了基础有效性——即有足够的实证证据表明一种方法能可靠地产生可预测的表现水平——已成为科学家和法律专业人士日益关注的问题。本文评估了刑事案件中所依赖的两种法医证据来源的基础有效性：目击证人的辨认决定和潜在指纹鉴定人员的结论。重要的是，确立基础有效性和估计准确性在概念和功能上是不同的。尽管目击证人常常会出错，但研究人员推荐的辨认程序基于数十年的系统性研究，这些研究证明了使用能提高目击证人决定可靠性的方法是合理的。相比之下，潜在指纹研究表明专家鉴定人员可能非常准确，但该领域的基础有效性受到以下因素的限制：过度依赖少数黑箱研究、忽视规模较小但质量较高的研究，以及倾向于将基础有效性视为一个固定的目标而非一个连续体。至关重要的是，缺乏标准化方法意味着对鉴定人员表现的任何估计都与潜在指纹鉴定的任何特定方法无关。尽管早期工作很有前景，但在该领域采用并测试明确界定的程序之前，潜在指纹鉴定的基础有效性仍将是一个有待实现的目标。
