Professor Imwinkelried delivers an annual lecture at Ole Miss Law

On Sept. 24, Professor Ed Imwinkelried delivered the annual Matthews Lecture at the University of Mississippi School of Law in Oxford, Miss.

The thesis of the lecture was that judicial toleration of overstated expert opinions in criminal cases has contributed to wrongful convictions and exacerbated the problem of mass incarceration in the United States. During the lecture, Imwinkelried argued that for decades, the courts have allowed forensic identification experts to make categorical source attributions that are epistemologically indefensible.

At the end of the lecture, he proposed limitations on the wording of expert opinions in several types of cases, including those in which the expert relies on a measurement and those in which there is a closed, finite set of possible sources for the physical evidence.

Imwinkelried later elaborated on the views he expressed during the lecture in a podcast recorded at the law school.

Professor Imwinkelried is a world-renowned evidence expert who has published extensively in the field.