Open Questions

Open Polygraph Examination

Why It Is Open The polygraph records physiological arousal (heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and skin conductivity), not deception directly, and its accuracy has never been validated to a standard most courts accept. United States courts have almost uniformly excluded polygraph results at trial, and trained subjects can learn countermeasures that defeat the test, yet the technique remains in operational use for screening and investigative leads.

What Would Settle It A physiological correlate of deception, distinct from generalized arousal, validated across diverse populations and shown to resist trained countermeasures in blind, controlled studies.

Expertise Needed Psychophysiology and forensic psychology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Polygraph.

Open Trace Evidence Analysis

Why It Is Open A joint FBI, Department of Justice and Innocence Project review found that FBI examiners had overstated the significance of microscopic hair comparison matches in the overwhelming majority of trial testimony and reports reviewed, in cases going back decades, including several that led to convictions later overturned by DNA evidence.

What Would Settle It A published statistical error-rate study for microscopic hair comparison under blind proficiency testing, and a documented professional consensus on what conclusion language, if any, the method can support without DNA confirmation.

Expertise Needed Forensic science standards and trace evidence analysis

Question posed in Innocence Project: FBI Testimony on Microscopic Hair Analysis Review.

Open Criminal Profiling

Why It Is Open Criminal profiling gained wide public visibility through cases such as the Jack the Ripper murders and the FBI Behavioral Science Unit's work, but controlled studies comparing trained profilers against detectives, psychologists and students with no profiling training have repeatedly failed to show that profilers predict offender characteristics more accurately than non-specialists.

What Would Settle It Blind, controlled comparative studies, replicated across research groups, showing profilers achieve statistically significant accuracy above both chance and non-specialist baselines on real case data.

Expertise Needed Forensic psychology and behavioral science methodology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Offender Profiling, Research section: Pinizzotto and Finkel 1990.

Open Crippen Case

Why It Is Open Hawley Harvey Crippen was convicted and executed in 1910 for murdering his wife based on remains found in his cellar, but in October 2007 Michigan State University forensic scientist David Foran published mitochondrial DNA analysis concluding the remains were not those of Cora Crippen, raising doubt about whether they were even female. In December 2009 the UK Criminal Cases Review Commission nonetheless decided not to refer the case to the Court of Appeal for a posthumous pardon, so the conviction stands legally while the scientific doubt remains unresolved.

What Would Settle It A definitive identification of the cellar remains, whether by further DNA comparison against a confirmed maternal-line relative of Cora Crippen or a fresh forensic anthropological reassessment accepted by a reviewing court, would settle whether the remains were hers at all.

Expertise Needed Forensic genetics and forensic anthropology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Hawley Harvey Crippen, death and legacy section, Foran DNA analysis and CCRC decision.

Open Ted Bundy Case

Why It Is Open Bundy was confirmed to have murdered at least twenty women and girls, confessed to about thirty killings shortly before his January 1989 execution, and investigators have long suspected the true total exceeds thirty-six; no single confirmed complete count of his victims exists.

What Would Settle It A confirmed complete list would require either further verified confessions (none possible after his execution) or forensic identification, by DNA or dental record, of unresolved missing-persons cases from the mid-1970s Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain corridor that match his known travel and offense pattern.

Expertise Needed Forensic identification and cold-case DNA analysis

Question posed in Wikipedia: Ted Bundy, Infobox, Murdered field.

Open Biosocial Criminology

Why It Is Open No freely accessible source states a specific founding year or coinage date. The Wikipedia article on the field discusses its modern revival only in general terms with no year attached. The Journal of Criminal Justice Education's 2022 history article, the most likely place such a year would be stated precisely, is paywalled (HTTP 403 on direct fetch, 2026-08-29). The predecessor depth wave (w-depth-crime-theories-0828) independently named C. Ray Jeffery's 1977 interdisciplinary-criminology work as the closest candidate but found no single fetchable source stating a precise founding year with a verbatim sentence to cite.

What Would Settle It Access to the paywalled 2022 Journal of Criminal Justice Education history article (see the BlockedFetch row registered in this same file), or any other citable source giving a specific year for the field's modern naming or the coinage of the term "biosocial criminology".

Expertise Needed History of criminology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Biosocial Criminology, Lead section (states the field's modern definition and revival with no year given).

Open Forensic Odontology

Why It Is Open The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report found no scientific basis for concluding that a bite mark can be matched to one person's dentition to the exclusion of all others, and a 2022 NIST draft review reached a similar conclusion. The American Board of Forensic Odontology has accepted this for identification claims and, between 2007 and 2018, progressively restricted its own diplomates to three findings only: exclude, not exclude, or inconclusive. Whether even an exclusion determination meets a reliable scientific standard, or whether the underlying premise that human dentition and bite-mark transfer are sufficiently distinctive and stable has itself been adequately tested, remains contested between the certifying body and the discipline's critics.

What Would Settle It A published, adequately powered black-box study of forensic odontologists' exclusion decisions, of the kind the 2011 Ulery fingerprint study provided for latent-print examiners, measuring false-exclusion and false-non-exclusion rates under casework-like conditions, would give the exclude/not-exclude claim the empirical grounding NAS and NIST found missing for identification.

Expertise Needed Forensic odontology and forensic science methodology

Question posed in Wikipedia: Forensic Dentistry, Bite mark evidence and controversy sections.

Open Jack the Ripper Murders

Why It Is Open No suspect was ever charged or convicted, and surviving physical and documentary evidence from 1888 is insufficient to identify the offender to modern evidentiary standards.

What Would Settle It A verified, contemporaneous piece of physical or documentary evidence directly tying a named individual to the murders, of a rigor that has not surfaced in over a century of inquiry.

Expertise Needed Historical forensic investigation

Question posed in Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper.