ICS News Archive

The Questionable Conviction, and Re-Conviction, of Ricky Joyner

Hal Stern, a statistics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied forensics, said he knew of no such studies on garbage-bag comparison. In fact, neither he nor Carriquiry had even heard of the discipline until contacted recently by a reporter.

Even if validated by research, no forensic test is infallible, Stern said. For example, studies have found that fingerprint comparisons, which have been studied far more extensively than plastic bags, have a false positive rate of at least 1 in 1,000.

“From a science standpoint,” he said, “it’s ludicrous to say anything has no error rate.”

Read the full story at ProPublica.