2020 IABPA Free Webinar
THIS FREE WEBINAR WAS PRESENTED LIVE
October 13, 2020
A live recording of the Webinar is now available for view:
Session 1: 8AM Eastern (US/Canada)
Session 2: 6PM Eastern (US/Canada)
Handout material is available for download:
Courtesy of Jeremiah Morris
The Scientific Foundations of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis
Jeremiah Morris, CBPA
Johnson County Sheriff's Office Criminalistics Laboratory
"The uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous." Those words concluded the discussion on bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) in the 2009 report issued by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. That singular sentence, along with a few well-publicized examples of errors made by a few analysts, have been the basis for some to question and challenge the validity of BPA in recent years. This presentation is an answer to those challenges. Skeptics are correct in their expectation that all scientific evidence provided in courts must rest firmly on scientific foundations and be trustworthy. This presentation will take a methodical approach to examining the scientific principles which lay at the heart of the discipline and how those principles are not unique to BPA. These same principles of feature-based classifications and event reconstruction are widely used across a number of established and accepted fields of science. This presentation will also discuss published studies which provide insight into the reliability of pattern classification. Additionally, the presentation will also discuss the nature of errors and why an erroneous conclusion, or even numerous erroneous conclusions, does not diminish the credibility of the broader discipline of BPA. Finally, the presentation will discuss how the community and individual analysts can strengthen and expand the scientific foundations of bloodstain pattern analysis.