SIMILARITY V DIFFERENCES - HAIR COMPARISON

• Jurisdiction: Australia

[88B.600] Introduction

Once described the hair examination process moves to comparison of a recovered hair with one or more known samples. Some examiners refer to hairs being similar. This may not be helpful as it does not give a sense of level of discrimination. For example, if you were to compare two non-featured and colourless hairs then indeed they would be similar but against a background of neither hair having "inherent" potential for discrimination. On the other hand comparison of two well featured brown hairs offers considerable potential to discriminate each from one another. Similar imparts no context of value. In the view of this author the starting point in a hair comparison should be to look for differences.

An often quoted statement is that "no two hairs are identical". Hence, there will always be differences. The key is to understand what is a meaningful difference. The examination process is essentially one of...