[jacquesm]

Insisting on resampling would be stupid, it will match twice that is not the problem. But if you insist on resampling then you are giving the evidence more weight than it can bear, much better to show that statistically it does not have much weight at all even if it matches (once, twice or more is not relevant).

The cold cases broken open are the ones that are left after all the other methods have already been exhausted. Sure, some of those might have remained unsolved if not for this method. But that does nothing to show the method by itself works better than all the other police work, for that to be concluded you'd have to compare with all the cases that were solved with ordinary police work and then to conclude that if all of them were first attempted to be solved with this method that the total outcome would be an improvement.

That seems unlikely. So for a very small fraction of extra cases solved a very large change in evidence gathering methods and dragnet style fishing for suspects does not seem to be worth it to me.

[detail-oriented]

Stupid if your client is guilty and you trust the database, not so stupid if your client insists they are innocent and the database governance processes are suspect.

[jacquesm]

That test will run the same way twice unless it has been tampered with, you'd have to be pretty sure before taking a gamble on that. The chances of a false positive are >> the chances of database tampering, why attack the harder target?