By Sebastian Wangombe
When you look at the current world, you wonder how small it has become. There is nowhere to hide, there is no secret to hide. The world is exposed and everyone is exposed. The world has been squeezed together by technology. The factual evidence to all these semantic questions is that the world had been brought to your palm through forensic science. All aspects of a life can be explained through forensics, just as modeling does to the world of mathematics. The world is but just forensics.
Forensics can give meaning to anything, can explain and predict an occurrence of phenomenon. As you walk your fingers through linguistics, engineering, soil science, pathology/biology, accounting, criminalistics, digital and multimedia sciences, toxicology, anthropology, jurisprudence, odontology, auditing and psychology you can’t miss pressing buttons forensics in one way or another.
Forensic science is a multi-disciplinary field that has taken a long time to be understood. It deals with evidence management in organized and procedural manner accepted by the practitioners. Evidence can be anything from a shoe print to the soil carried in compartments under one’s shoes. The application Forensics methods from natural and physical sciences to matters of criminal and civil law is not new to criminalistics, it has been for a long time.
Almost any science can be a forensic science because almost any science can contribute to solving a crime or evaluating a civil harm. In fact, with few exceptions, forensic sciences are no different in what they study than traditional sciences. The only difference is that forensic scientists apply the methods and techniques of established sciences to legal matters.
FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY: deals with skeletal biology, which includes bone and bone system structures and their relationships to characteristics such as gender, age, race, socioeconomic status, and so forth. That knowledge can be applied to the examination of characteristics of skeletal remains that are part of a crime scene. In such cases, the goal of the analysis may be to determine the identity of the deceased person.
Criminalistics usually called “forensic scientists can be defined as the application of scientific methods to the recognition, collection, identification, and comparison of physical evidence generated by criminal or illegal civil activity. It also involves the reconstruction of such events by evaluation of the physical evidence and the crime scene. They also analyze evidence such as body fluids in order to determine if DNA in those fluids matches blood found at a crime scene. Criminalists may help identify, collect, and evaluate physical evidence at a crime scene.
FORENSIC ENGINEERING: uses the concepts of mechanical, chemical, civil, and electrical engineering as tools in the reconstruction of crimes and accidents and the determination of their cause. A major component of that work involves traffic accident reconstruction. To determine what may have caused the accident, forensic engineers use evidence such as skid marks; damage to cars and their positions after the accident; road and environmental conditions; injuries to drivers, passengers, and pedestrians; and witness accounts.
JURISPRUDENCE: professionals who have a strong interest in the legal aspects of the status of scientific evidence in the courts. They study and comment on the admissibility of scientific evidence, especially new types of evidence. They are also concerned with the role of forensic science in general in the criminal justice system and about ethical issues as they apply to judges and lawyers.
FORENSIC ODONTOLOGY: also known as forensic dentistry is applied in the identification of a body from its dentition, which may be the only reliable way of identifying human remains in mass disasters, such as airplane crashes, fires, or wars. The forensic dentist can obtain an X-ray of the surviving teeth and compare it to antemortem dental X-rays. Of course, there must be some information about the possible identity of the body, and there must be some antemortem X-rays available for comparison.
A FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST is charged with determining the cause and manner of death. Forensic pathologists have three major duties to perform. They are called to crime scenes to make a preliminary examination of the body and perhaps an initial determination of the postmortem interval (the time since death). They will take charge of the body and direct the trained death scene investigators to carefully prepare and remove the body and transport it to the morgue for later analysis. Forensic pathologists determine the cause and manner of death by use of the postmortem examination, or autopsy.
FORENSIC ENTOMOLOGY: the first visitors to a corpse, especially one left outdoors, are insects. Many different types of insects will seek out a corpse and inhabit it for a short time, to deposit their eggs or larvae and to feed on the body. The role of the forensic entomologist is mainly to help determine the postmortem interval by examining which insect populations inhabit the body. Certain insects will attack the body right after death, whereas others will wait until some decay has taken place.
FORENSIC PSYCHIATRISTS have long been involved in determining whether persons are mentally competent to stand trial and to aid in their own defense. Intent is usually considered to be a prime factor in determining whether a crime has been committed. They are involved in crime scene reconstruction and psychological profiling. People who repeat the same type of crime are known as serial criminals. Such people usually have particular motivations and reasons for committing that type of crime and will tend to form behavioral patterns that show up time after time.
FORENSIC TOXICOLOGY is the application of such analysis to cases in which death or injury may have been caused by the ingestion of drugs or poisons. By far the most common kinds of cases examined by forensic toxicologists involve drunk or drugged driving.
Usually there are two categories of intoxication: “impaired” and “under the influence.” The latter requires a higher concentration of alcohol. The role of the forensic toxicologist in such cases is to measure the quantity of alcohol in the body, usually by blood analysis, and then to explain the effects of that quantity on the person’s ability to drive. Toxicologists are often asked to “back calculate” what the alcohol concentration in a person’s blood may have been at an earlier time, although this can be a difficult undertaking owing to the large number of variables.
Forensic toxicologists handle cases in which there has been an overdose of an illicit drug, which may contribute to or cause death. The toxicologist must be able to determine blood levels of the drugs or their metabolites and to interpret those findings and ascertain the role that the drug played in the person’s death. In many cases, more than one drug is taken or a drug may be taken in conjunction with alcohol, and the toxicologist must be able to interpret the interactions among those substances. In such cases, the toxicologist works closely with the forensic pathologist.
