https:\/\/reason.com\/2023\/06\/22\/maryland-supreme-court-limits-testimony-on-bullet-matching-evidence\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Forensic firearms identification includes well-established uses such as determining caliber and other general characteristics, but examiners are also frequently called on to testify whether a particular bullet was fired from a particular gun. A gun’s firing pin and the grooves on the inside of a gun barrel leave marks on cartridge casings when a bullet is fired, so a firearm examiner compares crime scene bullets to samples fired from the suspect gun and looks for matching patterns under a microscope.
\nAccording to the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners (AFTE), which sets standards for the field, a positive identification can occur when there is “sufficient agreement” between two or more sets of marks or patterns. The AFTE argues\u2014as one of its members did as a witness for the state of Maryland in Abruquah’s appeal\u2014that its methods are scientifically sound, widely accepted, and have low error rates in testing.<\/p>\n
However, over the past decade many forensic methods, especially “pattern-matching” disciplines like bite mark and tool mark analysis, have been challenged by critics who argue that they rely on subjective interpretations that are nonetheless presented as scientific conclusions in courtrooms.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[280,110,528],"class_list":["post-11144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-criminal-justice","tag-firearms","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11145,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions\/11145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}