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Archive for the ‘Forensics’ Category

Origins: Dem Dry Bones

Posted in Forensics, Origins, tagged , , , , , on March 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Skulls on a Beach: "Currents carry many d...

Skulls on a Beach: "Currents carry many dead things to Punuk Island making it the graveyard of the Bering Sea." (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.” -Henry Miller

Human ivory: the everlasting element. The skin will fade with time but who we are will forever remain the same, for bone will outlast everything. Our face will never be lost with time for it’s there, etch forever in the osseous tissue. Centuries may pass but our bones won’t. And the bone readers will always reveal us.

The year was 1849 and a man called Parkman disappeared. A suspect without a body appeared. In the assay oven, a Harvard janitor suspicious of Dr. Webster–the last man to see Parkman—found burned bones and false teeth. Dr. Wyman, an anatomy professor, led a forensic team and found that it matched a person of Parkman’s size and height. The dentures were recognized by Parkman’s dentist. This was the first significant piece of history for the field of forensic anthropology.

On February 11, 1938 the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, wrote the Secretary of the Smithsonian, C. G. Abbot, requesting the assistant of Aleš Hrdli…ka, an anthropologist whose was described as the best in his field, to examine bones thought to be human remains. They were not of human origin but this began the Smithsonian-FBI collaboration in Forensic Anthropology that still exists today.

The modern era of forensic anthropology began just a year later when W. M. Krogman published his Guide to the Identification of Human Skeletal Material in the F.B.I. Law Enforcement Bulletin. Krogman also published the first book on forensic anthropology, The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine. This sparked interest and carried the field forward into the future of forensics.

In 1972, The Physical Anthropology Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences was established. 

The bone readers have grown and multiplied. They are there to find us, to recreate our faces, and to say our name aloud. Time may pass but we won’t.  

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Origins: Sickle, Tissue and Flies

Posted in Forensics, Origins, tagged , , , on January 22, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Illustration of Esperienze intorno alla Genera...

A fly may conquer a lion – Proverb

There is a beginning for everything.  Everything starts with a story. Every story—real or fiction—has a purpose. The purpose can start a phenomenon in history. History can shape the present. The present is now. And now can make a better tomorrow.

In the Southern Sung Dynasty of ancient China, the year was 1235 and a murder was solved using insect activity. Sung Tzu, a lawyer and death investigator, was called to a village were a man was killed by a sickle. No one saw the murder. How could the killer be apprehended if he couldn’t be identified? Sung Tzu had the men of the village lay their sickles in the middle of the town square. He waited days. Files were attracted to one specific sickle. The reason: it had invisible tissue on it. The man owning the sickle confessed. Thus the beginning of entomology: the “science of determining a time frame and/or circumstance from the empirical evidence of insect activity on or around the site in question”.

Even though the story began in the thirteenth century, it was not used seriously till the twentieth century. And across the seven hundred years, entomology evolved. The Italian physician, Francesco Redi, made the first significant step in 1668. Spontaneous generation was a widely accepted theory that rotting meat created maggots. Redi disproved this theory. This led to the eventual devilment of insect life cycles. A little under two hundred years later, Dr. Bergeret d’Arbois, a French physician, became the first to use entomology to determine the time of death.

Entomology became a subject of fascination when Edgar Allen Poe published the poem “The Conqueror Worm”, where it described maggots feeding on a corpse. Later still, French veterinarian and entomologist, Jean Pierre Megnin, wrote two books in a common language discussing insect life cycles and decomposition. But the use of entomology in forensic was limited in the nineteenth and twentieth century because the lack technology.

In 2007, DNA analysis was used to distinct between species and to offer a more accurate determination of the “age” of eggs and larvae. This allowed a more precise assumption of the time of death.

From a tale of a sickle and to the science of DNA, entomology has skidded into the court rooms. Our everyday annoyance helps solve even the most demanding of cases by simply living out their cycle.

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C. S. I Don’t Think So

Posted in Forensics, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 14, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Main logo/inter-art for the television series ...

Image via Wikipedia

I wanted to be a forensic scientist for a long time…It’s like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. Solving mysteries seemed like it would be fun, scary and exciting all at the same time. -  Kristin Kreuk

Every time—without fail—I get the same response when I tell people my major: a shocked face with a not -so-subtle overlook of my person as if they couldn’t believe a nice girl like me would be into forensics. I always wonder what someone in forensics is supposed to look like (Abby from NCIS does come to mind). After their initial reaction they say along the lines of how cool it is or how interesting that sounds. I think to myself ‘dude, make-up your mind’ because their body language and the words that express their enthusiasm are not consistent.  I think the main reason for this is because of the misconceptions that the majority of people have pertaining to forensics.   

Forensics became popular because of TV shows like CSI, Bones and NCIS and it is because of these shows that make the reality difficult to explain. Once I get my degree in Forensic Chemistry, I will not be going to crime scenes to collect evidence, toting a gun, meeting with any suspects nor interrogate them. I will be working in a lab with goggles, gloves and the appropriate attire. The work will be tedious and grueling. It’s not glamorous like it’s shown on TV and I won’t be working in all of the areas of forensics. I won’t have a lot of expensive equipment that do all of the neat things that CSI exploit (it is estimated that about 40 percent of the scientific techniques depicted on CSI do not exist).My work will be back logged for months at a time and more often than not a case won’t be blown wide open because of my work. Crimes are usually solved by detectives knocking on doors and hitting the pavement and not solely on forensics.

This effect that CSI has on the general populace makes get trails more demanding. Modern jurors believe that there is always blood, fingerprints or DNA evidence in every case and if there are none present the jurors are inclined to believe that the defendant is not guilty.  Prosecutors are now spending more time telling the jurors why there is a lack of physical evidence or why it is irrelevant just to reverse that damage that CSI has done.

I love NCIS and enjoy watching other crime shows but allowing TV to affect reality is detrimental to the practice of Criminal Justice. Just because it’s on the television doesn’t mean it’s accurate.          

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