On the Continuum of Foundational Validity: Lessons from Eyewitness Science for Latent Fingerprint Examination

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.