The RDA Blog of Steve Cole
According to my high school yearbook, I was going to be an MD. But by the time I finished pre-medicine and a major in psychology at the University of Virginia, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So, after I graduated, I worked in a hospital doing diagnostic cardiology and neurology during the day, and got an MA in developmental psychology at Columbia University at night. I then knew I wanted to be a research scientist in order to explore the relations between mind and body. And Emory University’s doctoral program in human experimental psychology provided that training.
At Emory, I focused on research design and statistics, and perception and memory. As a graduate student, I began applying that expertise to issues in medicine, law and other social sciences such as the reliability of eyewitness identification and statistical models for prediction of survival of horses with colic. Yet there was a bonus to earning a Ph.D. at Emory: I met another research psychologist and we founded RDA in 1982. Nearly 30 years later, we and our associates continue to provide research expertise to business, legal, medical, and other social scientific communities. In 1994, I moved to small horse farm and opened our New York office. I have remained active in Emory’s research community and currently am Adjunct Professor of Psychology. I continue to explore mind-body issues and have just begun an NIH-funded 5-year study of the effect of compassion meditation on neuroendocrine, immune, and behavioral responses to psychological stress. For my own mind and body, I work an organic garden, ride an Icelandic horse, drive a 1959 Ford tractor, and care for 13 alpacas.
There have been 289 people proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in this country and that eyewitness misidentification testimony was a factor in nearly 75% of these exonerations, making it the leading cause of the wrongful convictions. The second greatest contributor to wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing is faulty forensic science. DOJ only made the findings available to prosecutors in the affected cases. And prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew had flawed evidence.
Read more … New Reports of Flawed Forensic Evidence
Since my blog a year ago, "Why Do So Many Eyewitnesses Get It Wrong?", there have been 29 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S. That brings the total to 289 people proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in this country. The true perpetrators have been identified in 139 (48%) of these DNA exoneration cases. Eyewitness misidentification testimony was a factor in nearly 75% of these exonerations, making it the leading cause of the wrongful convictions.
Read more … Is Eyewitness Memory Common Sense?
CMS contractors audit providers of Medicare services on a contingency-fee basis to find improper overpayments. With intense pressure to investigate fraud, and audit contractors incentivized with contingency fees to find improper overpayments, the audit system itself is ripe for error and abuse. Statistical analysts at Research Design Associates have expertise in challenging the sampling and extrapolation process. Often working with law firms representing providers in Medicare overpayment disputes, we investigate every phase of the process. Errors in sampling design and/or statistical analysis can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of incorrect extrapolated overpayments. It is worthwhile considering a challenge to audit statistical methodology since a successful challenge could nullify the extrapolation.
Read more … Help for Audited Medicare Providers
Improper payments for health care are estimated to range between 3% and 10% of total health care expenditures nationally. The Medicare program has introduced “recovery audit contracting” (RAC) as a way of assuring that proper payments are being made for services, identifying fraud and abuse. The goal is to reduce fraud during 2009 to 2012 by 50%. With intense pressure to investigate fraud and audit contractors incentivized with contingency fees to find improper overpayments, the audit system itself is ripe for error and abuse.
Read more … RAC Attacks: The Current Landscape of Medicare Audits
In my last blog I wrote about the New Jersey Supreme Court landmark decision that requires significant changes in the way courts evaluate identification evidence at trial and how they instruct juries. Eyewitness identification issues again have been headline news: Eyewitness testimony was the key evidence used to convict Troy Davis who was executed in Atlanta last night. There was no physical evidence linking Mr. Davis to the 1989 killing of a police officer in Savannah, Ga. Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial. Six of the witnesses said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis. The new rules mandated by the NJ Supreme Court for conducting identification procedures, however, should go a long way in reducing the pressures and influences on witnesses that may contribute to mistaken identifications.
Read more … Police Lineups Under Scrutiny
In August, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a landmark decision that requires significant changes in the way courts evaluate eyewitness identification evidence at trial and how they instruct juries. The court acknowledged a "troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications" based on an exhaustive review of the scientific research conducted since the 1970s.
Read more … Landmark Court Decision Mandates Changes in Eyewitness Identification Procedures
Research Design Associates statistical experts have been working with the the U.S. Department of Justice and voting rights organizations since the late 1980s to assess redistricting plans and voting practices for possible unlawful violations. New voting districts are drawn once a decade, after each census, to make sure that all congressional districts have roughly the same number of people and jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination are required to pre-clear new plans with the U.S. DOJ. After the 2000 census, RDA experts testified about redistricting issues in federal courts in Georgia, Montana, Virginia, and Wyoming.
Read more … Redistricting Battles Under Way
Now that the U.S. Census Bureau has tallied the 2010 population figures, the redistricting process has begun in earnest. The redistricting stakes are huge. Redistricting battles are occurring all across the U.S. Eighteen states are either adding or losing Congressional seats. The big winners are Texas which gained four seats and Florida which gained two. New York and Ohio are the big losers, each losing two seats. There is much pressure on state officials who recarve the electoral maps: to try to keep their grip on power or pry it away from opponents while taking into account pressure from those who want to lessen the impact of partisan politics.
Read more … The Statistics of Redistricting
Over 260 people have been exonerated through DNA testing in the U.S. More than 75% of these innocent people had one or more eyewitnesses misidentify them. In about 40% of these misidentified cases, multiple eyewitnesses identified the same innocent person. How can so many eyewitnesses be wrong? Many of these misidentifications could have been prevented and many wrongful convictions averted if police had used more reliable lineup procedures. Detecting problems with a lineup, that is, assessing the fairness of the lineup, can easily be done by the police before a witness views the lineup. But by using the proper precautions and testing lineups for fairness, we can decrease the likelihood of misidentifications.
Read more … Why Do So Many Eyewitnesses Get It Wrong?
As a psychology graduate student at Emory University in the late 1970s, I was looking for a way to apply what scientists knew about perception and memory in the laboratory to the real world. I designed a series of experiments that varied lineup size and the similarity of the decoys in the lineups to the suspect. After briefly viewing a video of a person cashing a check, subjects tried to identify that person in a lineup one week later. Based on the results of these experiments, I devised guidelines for lineups that maximized correct identifications and minimized false identifications. But I also was surprised by a counter-intuitive finding: there was no relationship between the level of confidence of the subjects and the accuracy of their identifications.
Read more … From the Lab to the Courthouse
