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This Letter to the Editor is a reply to Mohammed et al. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2021.100145, which in turn is a response to Morrison et al. (2020) "Vacuous standards - subversion of the OSAC standards-development process" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2020.06.005.

Perceptual experts have learned to rapidly and accurately perceive the structural regularities that define categories and identities within a domain. They extract important features and their relations more efficiently than novices. We used fingerprint examination to investigate expert-novice differences in feature choice. On each fingerprint within our set, experts and novices selected one feature they thought was most useful for distinguishing a particular print and one feature they thought was least useful. We found that experts and novices often differed in the features they chose, and experts tended to agree more with each other. However, any such expert-novice difference appeared to depend on the image at hand typically emerging when salient or more conspicuous features of a fingerprint were unclear. We suggest that perceptual training ought to direct attention to useful features with the understanding that what is useful may change depending on the clarity of the stimuli.

Contents I Introduction A A Case Study and a Few Caveats II Adversarial Trials, Trial Safeguards and Cross-Examination III A Brief Overview of Latent Fingerprint Jurisprudence in Australia IV Introducing [...], The ability to confront witnesses through cross-examination is conventionally understood as the most powerful means of testing evidence, and one of the most important features of the adversarial trial. Popularly feted, cross-examination was immortalised in John Henry Wigmores (1863-1943) famous dictum that it is 'the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth'. Through a detailed review of the cross-examination of a forensic scientist, in the first scientifically-informed challenge to latent fingerprint evidence in Australia, this article offers a more modest assessment of its value. Drawing upon mainstream scientific research and advice, and contrasting scientific knowledge with answers obtained through cross-examination of a latent fingerprint examiner, it illuminates a range of serious and apparently unrecognised limitations with our current procedural arrangements. The article explains the limits of cross-examination and the difficulties trial and appellate judges--and by extension juries--experience when engaging with forensic science evidence.

This article suggests that lawyers and judges may not understand the effects of their rules and procedures upon the production of evidence and its evaluation in criminal trials and appeals. Focusing on case studies involving the opinions of police officers and other investigators, as well as experts, it explains how applicable rules, procedures and safeguards did not produce, and appear incapable of producing, the effects claimed by courts. Drawing on scientific research – on cognitive bias and voice and face comparison – the article demonstrates how judges have enabled investigators to express their biased and speculative opinions, treated investigators' opinions as expert (or special) without evidence of validity or ability, and encouraged jurors to make their own voice and face comparisons in the highly suggestive context of the accusatorial criminal trial. Courts have placed great reliance on trial safeguards, such as cross‐examination and judicial directions, trivialised the difficulty of voice and image comparisons and overlooked the likelihood that juror interpretations will be incurably biased, and that the same evidence will be unwittingly counted more than once. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise in accessibility and portability of cameras has resulted in widespread reliance on the interpretation of images by analysts and investigators in criminal proceedings. Codes of practice, guidance and jurisprudence have evolved to facilitate the admission of opinions as to the identity of offenders (or persons of interest) at trial. In this article, we explain why allowing investigators to give opinions as to identity on the basis of familiarity with images or suspects acquired during the course of an investigation is incompatible with mainstream scientific research and advice, and conducive to error. It rests on the flawed assumption that investigators can reliably identify or recognise persons in images, articulate and document the basis of these 'identifications', and avoid the risk of contamination (really cognitive bias) from their knowledge of, or exposure to, domain-irrelevant information. Jurors, who may be invited to conduct their own comparison between an image and the defendant in the dock, are similarly vulnerable to assuming the task is straightforward, as well as many of the contextual and cognitive biases confronting investigators. Using the facts and evidence in R v Yaryare [2020] EWCA Crim 1314 as a case study, we show how case information available to investigators and imaging analysts both inform their interpretations of images and is (re-)presented at trial and on appeal as independent support for their opinions. We identify substantial threats to fairness, proof and rationality and propose that only witnesses with demonstrable expertise should be permitted to testify as to the identity of persons of interest in images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]