Despite all of the good that using science in criminal investigation has done. Like all things there have been some hiccups. DNA testing has both enhanced and eroded the status of forensic science in criminal cases. Conventional forensic disciplines were unable to identify a perpetrator with any true discrimination. For instance, conventional serology (the study antigen or antibodies) field analysis of blood group substances was largely used in sexual assault cases during the 1980s (Mosby's Medical Dictionary 8th edition, 2009).…
The first meeting with Maria was interesting. We met at my desk she sits in front of me and I started the Risk assessment. The assessment is basic, questions about back from home country, mental status, psychosocial and other basic information about the journal to the United States. Unfortunately the meeting is not private and children are not able to talk comfortably about anything.…
Physical evidence that is left behind in a crime scene plays and important role in reconstructing the various events that took place during the crime . Crime scene reconstruction depends upon joint efforts of law enforcement personnels, medical examiners and criminologist to find the physical evidence and to understand the events that surrounds the occurrence of a crime. If there is a bloodstains then the location and the distribution of the blood stain along with the spatters maybe useful in explaining the events that caused the bleeding. An investigator can decipher from an individual bloodstain, the direction of blood, when it impacted the surface it was deposited on. Bloodstain patterns, consisting of many individual bloodstains…
Evidence Interpretation Over the years, there have been several cases that have been resolved with a false guilty plea or cases where a guilty party was not convicted of a crime. There are various elements that play a role in solving cases; evidence is a one of these key elements. Many factors can determine if the evidence submitted before a court of law is accurate such as how the evidence is collected, if proper protocell was followed before the laboratory’s handling of the evidence, and if the evidences was accurately processed by the crime scene laboratory by various forensic scientists. Furthermore, with the advances in technology in today’s society, various pieces of evidence such a DNA analysis have been considered a crucial element…
In July of this year 70,000 rape kits that have never been tested were identified from records from around 1,000 different police departments. As astonishing as that is, it doesn't even cover the whole scope of the situation seeing as there are roughly 18,000 police departments in the US (Reilly, par. 4). Imagine, if there are 70,000 untested rape kits for every 1,000 police departments, then there are, potentially, 1,260,000 untested rape kits out there. It's mindboggling on how, what people call the rape kit backlog, has gotten so large. For those that do not know, a rape kit, is the container of evidence that is collected from a victim of a sexual assault, that is used to help find the perpetrator of the crime.…
This week’s assignment regarding the study of victimology has me torn on which area that I would like to discuss, as the entire subject intrigues me. I was graced with a gift of being able to see situations from varying point of views, however, this week I had to do a self-check. I realized that I am human and my own biases can and will affect the way that I view a situation. Although I knew that there was violence among prisoners who are incarcerated, I never viewed them as victims, until now.…
Evidence from thousands of unsolved rape cases and homicides have not been tested for DNA (Willing 1). This shows the problem because there are many cases that have not been tested for DNA when the evidence may be there. About 48,000 of 90,000 rapes in 2000 were not solved due to the lack of DNA evidence (Willing 2). This suggest that with better technology to analyze DNA these crimes could have been solved.…
The outcomes of a majority of crime scene investigations, which result in the prosecution of a suspect, is dependent upon the tenacity and admissibility of evidence. At trial, the evidence presented can be anything can be evidence that provides direct proof in support of a claim or belief of an assertion to prove or disprove any facts in speculation at trial or controversy, thus confronting flaws with proof or other means to form a conclusion or judgment. Simply put, anything that might have the slightest bearing on the outcome of a case can be broadly classified as evidence, provided it has a logical tendency to relate to the outcome of the case, therefore, in a criminal case, if the matter has a bearing on the guilt or innocence of the defendant,…
“The Effect of Participant Sex, Victim Dress, and Traditional Attitudes on Causal Judgements for Marital Rape Victims”, by Mark A. Whatley, touches base on what marital rape is. A lot of people believe that rape is not present in a marriage, but it most definitely is. Marital rape affects more than one out of seven married women (Whatley 1). I totally agree with his statement, if someone is brought up being taught to wait to have sex after marriage, their parents can sometimes forget to teach them not to rape, even after they are married. Marital rape is something I feel strongly about because rape is something a lot of humans do not know takes place in marriage.…
Forensic science [2-4] is an area that deals with the application of scientific knowledge to legal situations. As such, it provides a great deal of truth to many legal proceeding. The forensic sciences – forensic chemistry [5-8], forensic biology [9,10], forensic anthropology [11], forensic medicine [12], forensic materials science [13,14], forensic engineering [15], computational forensics [16], among others – are broadly used to resolve civil disputes, to justify and enforce criminal laws and government regulations, and to protect public health. It should be kept in mind, however, that forensic analysis is strongly controlled by the legal constraints which affect both the work implementation and the results. (REF JH INTRO)…
Your eyes are the door to your soul”, there many poems with these phrase, many believe that to trust someone you just must look into their eyes, and maybe that is truth. But to know from where someone came from, how they live and how they died, their eyes will not help because when we died they close forever, and in that moment when not even our faces are recognizable the truth about ourselves lies in our bones. People often think that our bones are not more than a part of our bodies that help us moves and live, but they are much more than that, they store every one of our experiences, when we fall or how much time we have spent wearing heals. Our bones are for a human like a hard drive is for a computer, it’s a storage of memories that we can appreciate if we look deep. Our bones are so important that if we died a violent dead they can help identified how it happen, when it happen and even who did it.…
The investigators gets evidence from the crime scene, and takes to a labortory and multiple tests on the it. Sometimes science aspects don’t always help solve the…
1. Why was it important for Sandy to keep the school principal and others informed about her plans? It is important to keep the school officials informed because she would have to validate her reasoning for wanting to address the situation via a group rather than individually. Because this is not the school 's usual protocol and there would probably be some skepticism of her desire to handle the situation in this manner, so it is important for this to be a collaborative effort. Moreover, Sandy was working with teens who had a history of violent behavior, so for her safety and the children 's as well it would be wise to keep officially informed of the group 's progress.…
Sexual assault and rape in the United States of America is reaching new epidemic levels and nothing is being done to stop it. Rape kits sit untested and collecting dust all over the United States and it is estimated that the numbers have reached hundreds of thousands. In places like New York City for example, the backlog of untested rape kits by 2003 had reached 17,000. In order to reduce this epidemic, the country must implement harsher punishments and prioritize educational classes earlier in age in order to emphasize the importance of consent and responsibility.…
Forensic science is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly—on the criminal side—during the criminal investigation, as governed by the legal standards of admissible evidence and criminal procedure. Forensic comes from two Latin words forum and forensic which mean open in court, public. The meaning of the word forensic is relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime. Forensic is a field of science work together to answer the questions a lawyer would ask. Most often, forensics is about proving that someone was present at a place where a crime was committed.…