The Place of Forensic Voice Comparison in the Ongoing Paradigm Shift

We are in the midst of what Saks & Koehler (2005) have called a paradigm shift in the evaluation of evidence in the forensic comparison sciences. This is a shift to requiring that the evaluation of forensic evidence actually be scientific, including that the reliability of methodologies be testable, and requiring that forensic evidence be evaluated and presented to the courts in a logically correct manner. Reliability was a primary concern in the US Supreme Court’s Daubert decision in 1993. The logically correct evaluation and presentation of the weight of forensic evidence was a primary concern in a number of court cases in the United Kingdom including the Appeal Court of England and Wales’ 1996 ruling on the presentation of DNA evidence in R v Doheny & Adams. In the US National Research Council’s report to Congress released in February 2009 current practice in the evaluation of nuclear DNA evidence is held up as a model to emulate, and current practices in other branches of forensic science are subject to sometimes severe criticism. In the present paper I examine the place of forensic voice comparison in the ongoing paradigm shift. Over the last decade a small number of forensic-voice-comparison researchers have been working in the post-shift paradigm. They have adopted the likelihood-ratio framework for the evaluation of forensic evidence, the same framework as used in DNA analysis. I provide a brief description of the likelihood-ratio framework, followed by a brief history of the adoption of the likelihood-ratio framework for forensic voice comparison by the research community, and by the forensic practitioner, lawenforcement, and judicial communities.