Customer Reviews

Statistics and the Evaluation of Evidence for Forensic Scientists (Statistics in Practice)

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With the introduction of DNA evidence, litigation on discriminatory practices and lawsuits against manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies that using clinical trial and reliability data the use of statisticians a expert witnesses has grown. Now the statistical profession is being used in the courts as much as the psychiatric profession. I have even recently been deposed as an expert witness in a medical device lawsuit. This book has become the classic in forensic science since its publication in 1995. As Lindley points out in forward, the first edition gave a thorough accounting of the field as it existed in 1995. But with so many advances by 2004 when this second edition came out the book grew dramatically in size. It is now over 500 pages including the indices. The references to the literature is also quite thorough. Both the frequentist and Bayesian approaches are describe but there is far more reliance on the Bayesian approach. Law cases are presented as examples and common fallacies are discussed.

This is a very sophisticated approach to legal questions and it includes two rather long but important chaptes on the evaluation of evidence (chapter 3) and the interpretationof the evidence (chapter 7). Special topics include transfer evidence (chapter 8), fibres (chapter 12) and DNA profiling (chapter 130. Methodology chapters also appear, sampling (chapter 6), multivariate analysis (chapter 11)and Bayesian networks (chapter 14).

This is a great reference book for statisticians and forensic scientists. I think trial judges in both civil and criminal cases should get familiar with this book.

This book has no example problems and way too much verbiage. The book does not relate much to forensic science.