BIO 301D Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: False Positive Rate, O. J. Simpson, Innocence Project
Document Summary
Forensics 10/5/16: many wrongful convictions in the us mainly from bad data or bad methods. In many cases, methods were never tested or validated. Innocence project: started after the oj simpson trail, 344 exonerations reported (20 were on death row at some time or another, another site reports 2000 exoneration in the us. In 2001-2002, 67 people had been freed by dna testing after conviction. The 67 people were 2/3 of all people tested at the time. Undoubtedly biased in the favor of innocent people: methods, 4 criteria of an ideal method. Before 2000: reference database existed since mid-1900s. But there was no way to search it until after 2000. There was no way to screen it till later on: until 2000, no discrete characteristics for declaring a match, no explicit protocol for matching before 2000, voluntary proficiency tests in 1995-1998. False positive rate was at least few percent and as high as 22%
