Forensic Firearms in Criminal Trials: Legal, Investigative, and Scientific Aspects

Over the last two‑plus decades, the scientific validity of the principles that underpin identifying a firearm from recovered fired ammunition has been a core issue for the admissibility of expert evidence in criminal trials in the United States. The issues that dominated the determinative points, as they related to the scientific and technological analysis, centered around the following: the validity of uniqueness of firearms, subjective methodology, the potential rate of error, unknown sta...