Citation

Morrison GS. Law Probab. Risk 2022; 21(2): 127-129.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/lpr/mgac015

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

To the Editor,There is an ongoing debate about how to deal with 'inconclusive' conclusions when calculating error rates. Recent contributions to this debate include, in chronological order, Dror and Scurich (2020), Weller and Morris (2020), Biedermann and Kotsoglou (2021), Arkes and Koehler (2021), Dror (2022) and Arkes and Koehler (2022). All the proposed solutions are inappropriate because they do not address the real problem. The real problem is not what to do with 'inconclusive' conclusions but the fact that forensic practitioners report conclusions as 'identification', 'inconclusive' and 'exclusion' at all. The real solution is for practitioners to abandon this practice and, instead, adopt the logically correct framework for interpretation of forensic evidence, the likelihood-ratio framework. Rather than reporting each of their conclusions as one of three categories, practitioners should report them as continuously-valued likelihood-ratio values.1

Language: en