Identification of Areas of Weakness in Forensic Footwear Research

Forensic footwear examinations have been carried out for almost a century, but the foundational validity of identifying a questioned impression to a particular shoe has been questioned by the National Research Council and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The focus of this paper was to identify the current weaknesses present in forensic footwear impression research. Additionally, a future experiment was proposed to address these concerns and improve the foundational validity of footwear impression comparisons. A total of 15 footwear research studies varying in methodology and content were analyzed and contrasted. From this, a lack of studies significantly supporting the comparative strength of randomly acquired characteristics adding to the uniqueness of an outsole was noted. The future research experiment proposed aims to address these weaknesses by using a large sample of the same style of shoes. These impressions would then be analyzed by humans to determine if any randomly acquired characteristics occurred in the same spot, size, and orientation on two different outsoles across the sample.