Introduction-Forensic Science

1. Introduction of topic
a. Definition of Forensic Science-Uneasy/unholy marriage
of
i. Science-the objective seeker of truth &
knowledge
ii. Forensics-the argumentative persuader of
courtroom advocacy
b. Prefer to think of ourselves as our Mother’s Child-
Mother Science
i. Pure
ii. Incorruptible
iii. Firmly rooted in Scientific Method
c. Lots of pressure from detectives, police departments,
lawyers for “Bad Science”
i. Have students comment on each of these
examples of “Bad Science”
1. There is an old Bad Science joke about a
scientist who was working with an ant. The
scientist would cut off one of the ant's legs
and shout, "Jump!" And the ant would jump.
The scientist cut off a second leg, and told
the ant to jump, and again the ant jumped.
And so it went, until the scientist had cut off
all six of the ant's legs. This time, when told
to jump, the ant did not jump. This proves it,
the scientist concluded, when you chop all
the ant's legs off, it becomes deaf!
2. Misinterpretation of Test Results - In a
robbery trial, the victim, a bartender testifies
that the defendant had come into the tavern
earlier in the night for a glass of beer. Three
unwashed glasses were found at the scene,
seized, and later processed for fingerprints.
 Two of the glasses yielded prints, but they
belonged to persons unknown - not the
defendant. The prosecutor suggests that the
fingerprint examiner testify that the third
beer glass must have been used and then
wiped clean by the defendant, because the
other two glasses were obviously not used
by him. The fingerprint examiner suggests
that the prosecutor look elsewhere for this
kind of testimony. The prosecutor looks
surprised.
3. Manipulation of Raw Data - An accident
reconstruction expert with a computer is
hired by a plaintiff's attorney to determine
the speed of the defendant's vehicle in a
two-car collision. The expert enters into his
computer program the road surface drag
factor, skid and yaw mark lengths, and the
location and severity values of the vehicle
damage. The first run of his computer
program produces an unrealistically high
speed for the defendant striking vehicle. The
expert changes his drag factor estimates and
tries again. The figures are still outrageous.
Three program runs and several crush data
changes later, the speed determination
begins to look more believable. The
defendant's attorney begins his attack of the
tests with a subpoena for all five of the
expert's computer printouts.
4. Comparing Apples and Orangutans - In a
product liability suit, the plaintiff's attorney
finds an expert who will testify that, if the
shotgun involved in the shooting had as safe
 a firing mechanism as a rivet gun, the
incident may not have happened at all.
5. Manipulation of Test Results - During a
burglary trial, the prosecution produces
seven latent fingerprints which were
recovered from inside the victim's house.
The fingerprint examiner testifies that he has
identified these prints as belonging to the
defendant. The prosecutor testifies that the
fingerprints are like seven different
photographs of the suspect inside the house.
Because he does not want a repeat of an
earlier case lost to the defense attorney, the
prosecutor calls a second examiner to the
stand to verify the comparisons made by the
first. The prosecutor then states that the
seven fingerprints, times two examiners,
make fourteen little photographs of the
suspect inside the house. Later, when asked
why he didn't call a third examiner to up the
score to twenty-one fingerprints, the
prosecutor replies that he had simply
neglected to subpoena a third examiner.
6. Compulsive Computing - A .223
Remington bullet is found lodged in the side
of a house several hundred feet to the rear of
a rifle practice range where .223
ammunition is frequently used. The
investigators want to know if a it is possible
for a .223 bullet to fly the several hundred
feet necessary to reach the house from the
range, so they ask a firearms examiner. The
examiner, who ha recently invested in a
ballistics program for his home computer,
took down the range, wind speed, bullet
 shape, temperature, barometric pressure, and
several other pieces of data. His computer
charted the results. Finally his answer to the
investigator was, "Yes, it is possible." As a
qualified firearms examiner, he had already
known that the house was well within the
range of the .223 bullet and could have
given the same answer when first asked the
question...without computation.
7. Denial - In many major criminal
investigations, it is the practice of detectives
to offer a polygraph examination to the
suspect, and, in cases of questionable
accusations, to the victims. While they are
not admissible in court, the polygraph
results are relied upon as a valuable
investigative tool. One day a young police
officer shoots and wounds a juvenile who he
claims fired upon him first, although no
weapon was found. The officer claims he
was also struck several times about the head
and shoulders with a board prior to the
shooting, although he exhibits no bruises,
head injuries, or defense injuries to his
hands or arms. When asked about this lack
of consistent injuries, a detective reports that
the officer was wearing a bullet resistant
vest. The detectives do not offer the suspect
or the police officer a polygraph
examination in this particular case.
8. No Scientific Methodology - A city truck
driver runs a stop sign and causes an
accident which results in severe injuries.
Instead of relying on skid marks, crush
damage, and scene evidence, the city
 authorities order a traffic investigator to
conduct acceleration tests to determine the
maximum possible speed the truck could
have achieved in the one-block distance
leading up to the crash. Because the truck
was disabled in the crash, the traffic
investigator uses a motorcycle to run the
one-block acceleration test and reports back
a peak speed of 35 miles per hour for the
city truck.
9. Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth - A city
bus rear-ends a carload of teenagers, killing
four. The first traffic investigators at the
scene measure the skid marks of the bus and
determine that the bus driver was speeding.
A national civil rights leader claims that the
bus driver is being made a scapegoat by the
city solely because he is of a racial minority.
The follow-up investigation by the city
authorities reports that the original traffic
investigators, who have been abruptly
removed from the case, must have been
measuring tire marks tracked through melted
roadway tar and that, on second thought, the
city bus driver was not speeding. A local
television station gets a radar gun and
reports that most drivers, including city bus
drivers, regularly exceed the speed limit on
this stretch of road. Tire tracks in tar look
nothing like skid marks to the trained eye of
the investigator. Excessive speed aside, it is
unlawful to follow another vehicle at an
unsafe distance.
10. Pursuit of the Inconsequential - In the
faked robbery of a fast food restaurant, the
night manager shoots to death an employee
in a walk in cooler, hides the "stolen" money
and a .357 magnum revolver and calls
police. The crime scene personnel notice
fallen dust on a restroom floor and discovers
the money hidden in a ceiling panel. The
revolver is found among the night manager's
possessions. In preparation for the trial, the
prosecutor asks for a shooting sound test to
be done inside the restaurant's walk in
cooler. This, he says, will determine whether
or not the fatal shots could have been heard
by a teenage girl who was having sex with a
man (not her boyfriend) in her boyfriend's
van parked across the street from the
restaurant. The girl, who incidentally had a
full length cast on her leg at the time
(another mystery altogether), did not recall
hearing much of anything, least of all
gunfire. Her partner that night also somehow
missed the sounds. The crime scene
investigator refused to participate in such an
experiment, arguing that it was irrelevant,
invalid, and just plain silly...and what would
it prove, anyway? The prosecutor suggests
that the defense might use the fact that the
girl had not heard the shots to argue that the
time of the murder was somehow different.
"Then let the defense make a sound test,"
the investigator says, leaving. The
prosecutor is insistent. After being turned
down by the police firearms instructor and
the state regional laboratory examiners, the
prosecutor gets three detectives to fire the
shots for the sound test. To duplicate the
 sounds of a .357 magnum, they load the
weapon with light .38 special target loads;
they fire the quieter ammunition into a
sandbagged pipe inside the walk in cooler so
as not to make holes in the walls. It is
several months later, and the air temperature
is sixty degrees cooler than the night of the
murder. By the time the test begins, the
noisy morning rush hour traffic has clogged
the street in front of the restaurant. To
duplicate the hearing of the busy girl with
the cast on her leg and other things on her
mind, they use the prosecutors ears as he
stands across the street. (Later there were
several profane allegations about what the
prosecutor had to endure to fully recreate the
event.) The results of the test? "It sounded
like a hand clap," said one of the detectives
stationed in the restaurant's dining room. So,
apparently one can induce deafness by
making love to a girl in a full-length cast,
the same as one can by cutting all six legs
off an ant.
ii. To Prevent “Bad Science
1. The first is the methodological battle plan
called "Ockham's Razor," named after the
14th century philosopher William of
Ockham. In philosophy, a problem should
be stated in its basic and simplest terms. In
science, the theory that fits the facts of a
problem with the fewest number of
assumptions is the one that should be
selected. This is the great-grandfather of
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) theory, and
it works well against Bad Scientists.
2. The second tactic is termed "reducio ad
absurdum," which is the disproof of a
proposition (or stupid experiment) by
showing the absurdity to which it leads
when carried out. A good example of such a
situation is the aforementioned case of the
prosecutor who argued that seven
fingerprints identified by two fingerprint
examiners make a total of fourteen little
traces of the burglary defendant. The
reduction ad absurdum of that case is the
notion that a third fingerprint examiner
would up the ante to twenty-one clues, or
that a dozen examiners identifying a single
print would make for twelve traces of the
defendant. The clues multiply like bunny
rabbits. The mind boggles. Think of where
the Bad Scientist is trying to lead you. And
look to the dark at the end of the tunnel.
3. The final fallback is to common sense, the
bane of Bad Scientists the world over. It was
Thomas Huxley who said, "Science is
simply common sense at it's best - that is
rigidly accurate in observation, and
merciless to fallacy in logic." This is where
the juries trod on the best laid plans of
eloquent attorneys. They step back for a
moment and resort to instinct, to common
sense. Lawyers, especially those true
believers who do the prosecuting, are
notoriously bad at feigning common sense.
They are better at reduction ad absurdum.
Cops, on the other hand, are excellent at
instinct and common sense, but poor at
 seeing the absurdity of a proposition's
logical conclusion.
2. Observation-The first step to good scientific investigation
a. Use the How observant are you? activity to demonstrate
to the students that memory is not literal. We do not
remember exactly what we see, our memories are
affected by opinion, expectation, and other subjective
factors.
i. This activity demonstrates our ability to
remember details accurately. Testimony about
personal experience is frequently used during an
investigation. How accurately do people
remember what they have seen? What factors may
play a role in what we can remember and describe
about something we have witnessed? Consider
these questions as you do the following activity.
1. Pass out the pictures face down. At your
signal have students turn the picture over
and look at it for 30 seconds. Have them
turn the papers back over and collect them
2. Ask the class to write on another sheet of
paper the answers to these questions
a. What time was it on the clock?
b. How many people were in the scene?
How many males? females?
c. Describe the person at the front of the
line. Was it a man or a woman? Was
he or she wearing a hat? What kind of
clothes was the person wearing? Could
you tell how tall the person was? Did
he or she have any distinguishing
features?
d. What day of the month was it?
e. Did you notice anything unusual in the
picture?
 3. Have the class give you the answers to put
on the board.
4. If you wish/time permits, you can pass out
the pictures again for the students to look at
with the questions in hand
b. Have the students discuss the factors that may affect
memory. Then, use the How observant are other
people? activity to allow the students to see how
eyewitnesses may not be reliable.
i. As you experienced, your own memory can
sometimes fool you. But what about other
people's memories? Try out this exercise to see
how witnesses to the same science remember
different details. Think about how useful an
individual's testimony can be. Does it help to have
several witnesses to a scene?
1. Divide the class in half, thirds, or fourths
depending on the size of the class. You want
6-8 people per group.
2. Have two of each group be the detectives.
The rest are the eye-witnesses to a scene.
3. Have the detectives all go out in the hall for
a couple of minutes
4. Pass out the second set of pictures face
down.
5. Have the students turn them over and look at
them for 30 seconds. Have them turn them
face down and collect them.
6. Have the detectives come back in and go to
their group. Each detective should question
each witness. Have the detectives
reconstruct the scene. If the detectives need
some help coming up with questions to ask
suggest:
 a. How many people were involved in
the scene?
b. What can you tell about each
individual's hairstyle, gender,
approximate age, etc.
c. Was there anything unusual going on?
7. Compare the reconstructions of the groups
with each other and the original. Do more
eye-witnesses help or hurt?
3. Perceptual Fallacies
a. Our normal perceptions do not correspond directly to
reality. The things that we perceive (see, hear, smell,
etc.) are not entirely determined by what our senses
detect. Our perceptions are also determined by what we
expect, what we know, what we believe
i. Our perceptions are not photographs they are
constructions- something that our minds
manufacture
ii. what we perceive is partially determined by what
we know or believe
iii. constructive perception has survival value - helps
us make sense of the world
iv. So, seeing is not necessarily believing
b. Our tendency to have perceptual experiences in the
absence of stimuli
i. color constancy
1. We often perceive an object to be a color
because we expect it to be a certain color.
EXAMPLE: If you have a cutout or a tree
and a donkey both made from green
material, and lit by red light, people will
often perceive the cutouts as green trees and
gray donkeys.
2. You can have left brain/right brain conflict
when reading words that are a certain color
 3. Pass out sheets with words written in color.
Have Students follow directions. Collect
Sheets
4. We also perceive color sometimes when it is
physically impossible. EXAMPLE: The
vision cells in the center of the retina are the
only ones that can see color. Therefore, we
should only see color in the center of our
visual field. Objects in our peripheral vision
should not appear in color. But we see color
throughout the field. Why? Color constancy!
Try looking at colored objects with your
peripheral vision - what do you see?
ii. size constancy - learned perception (does a truck
driving in the distance get smaller?)
1. You perceive the size of familiar objects
(like a truck) to be the same size no matter
how far away they are because you know
that distance doesn't change the size of an
object. However, the size of the image on
your retina shrinks as an object moves away
from you.
2. There is a tribe called the Ba Mbuti that
provide evidence that size constancy is
learned. This tribe lives in a thick jungle
where they never are able to see more than a
few yards away. When taken into a field and
shown buffalo in the distance, they asked
what kind of insects they were. When told
that the animals were buffalo, the tribes
people thought it was witchcraft.
c. Expectation
i. We perceive what we expect to perceive
1. Flashing light experiment- subjects were
told to walk down a hall and stop walking
 when they saw a light flash. Many subjects
stopped walking despite the fact that no
flash was given. They simply expected a
flash and believed they saw one. Similar
experiments have shown subjects who could
feel warmth, smell an odor, or feel an
electric shock because they expected to.
2. We have all experienced such
hallucinations. Have you ever seen the
hands on a clock move only to find out that
the clock didn't run? Have you ever heard
the phone ring when you were in the
shower, but later found it had not rung at
all?
3. What other experiences have you had that
may have been due to expectation?
d. Looking for Clarity in Vagueness
i. When our senses are confronted with a formless
stimulus, we often perceive something distinct.
We look at clouds, smoke, fuzzy paintings and see
shapes that are familiar. This illusion is called
pareidolia. Many cases of pareidolia are common
1. Man in the Moon - cultural example
2. Samoans see a woman weaving
3. Chinese see a monkey pounding rice
4. East Indians see a rabbit
5. Jesus' image in a tortilla - famous case of a
housewife in New Mexico who found the
shape in the skillet burns and took it as a
sign of Christ's second coming
6. Messages in rock music
7. Man in the shadows - Do you ever feel as
though someone is following you?
8. UFOs - we try to make something familiar
out of a vague object.
 9. The Blondlot Case and N-rays - famous case
in which scientist Rene Blondlot announced
the discovery of N-rays, which could be
detected by the human eye and were emitted
by metals. They apparently increased the
brightness. Blondlot claimed that this type
of radiation was blocked by lead. Scientists
could not reproduce his results because the
experiments were entirely subjective.
Another scientist named Wood challenged
Blondlot while participating in a test of N-
rays. He told Blondlot that a lead sheet was
in place when it was not, and Blondlot
claimed to see the rays. Wood then placed
the lead sheet in front of the source of N-
rays and Blondlot claimed to see the N-rays.
Blondlot's observations depended entirely
on his beliefs, and were not correlated to
when the sheet was actually in place
e. Memory
i. our memories are constructive, not literal
ii. imagine a scene.......How do you look at it?
iii. Recall a scene - do you look at it through your
own eyes?
iv. Car accident film - hit vs. smash and long term
memory - if people watch a car accident on film
and are asked a question after viewing the scene,
the wording of the question affects how the
subject remembers the scene. When asked "How
fast were the cars going when they smashed?",
subjects reported faster speeds when asked about
it again later than subjects who were asked, "How
fast were the cars going when they hit?"
v. Selective memory - Dreams, we have over 250 a
night but only remember a few of them, if any
f. Judging
i. We can lead ourselves to believe that something is
paranormal or supernatural when it actually isn't
ii. Have you ever had a friend call just when you
were thinking about them? It may seem strange or
paranormal, but there are many more times when
you think about someone or something and
nothing related happens.
iii. What are the chances that 2 people out of a party
of 23 have the same birthday? 1/2-----1/1000-----
1/40----- 1/2020 (Answer 1/2!)
iv. How many things happen to you in the course of a
day? Incredible pairings are more likely than you
think
g. Science is a systematic attempt to get around these
limitations. Science tries to remove personal experience
from the scientific process.
i. Scientific Method
1. State Problem using operationally defined
variables
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Determine the variables
a. Independent variable(s)
b. Dependent variable(s)
c. Control(s)
d. Standards of comparison
(Experimental control)
4. Determine the materials and procedures
5. Make qualitative observations
6. Obtain quantitative data
7. Analyze and interpret the results
8. Identify possible sources of error in the
experiment
9. Write a conclusion
10. Determine other tests to be done
4. Have Students start hand writing analysis for next day
a. Pass out a check to each student and have them endorse
the back using the name of the payee (forge the
signature)
b. Collect the endorsed checks keeping the groups separate
c. Have each student write this note on a piece of paper
Dear Mr. Miller,
Please excuse Allison from school yesterday. She was sick
with a high fever.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Smith
d. Collect the excuses keeping the groups separate
5. The Wife Puzzle
a. Use if there is more time. Adjust instructions to time
available-can be take home problem to work on for next
day
i. A lovely cashmere sweater was found torn to
shreds (What a Crime!!) on the sidewalk in the
international quarter.
ii. The sweater police talked to six witnesses,
including the shredder. The six were very open
about what had happened. The only trouble was
that none of them spoke any language the police
could understand. Nevertheless, the police were
able to piece together the following information
1. The witnesses were three men and three
women: Fred, John and William; Gloria,
Gilda, and Barbara
2. The men were married to the women,
though not necessarily in the order listed
3. William's wife was the cashmere murderer
4. Fred speaks and understands only Basque
5. John is bald
 6. The couple who live next door to Gilda and
her husband have the same color hair she
does, and speak both Spanish and Basque.
7. William's wife recently gave Barbara a
home permanent
8. Gilda's husband speaks only French
iii. Who destroyed the lovely sweater?
iv. Solution to the Wife Puzzle
1. If you can identify William's wife, you'll
know the shredder
2. William's wife isn't Barbara, because the
former gave the latter a permanent.
William's wife must be either Gilda or
Gloria
3. Fred's wife isn't Gilda, because he speaks
only Basque and her husband speaks only
French. So Fred's wife is either Gloria or
Barbara.
4. If John is bald, he doesn't live next door to
Gilda and he doesn't speak Spanish and
Basque.
5. Therefore, John must speak French and be
married to Gilda. Only Gloria can be
William's wife and the horrible cashmere
shredder.
6. Time left over? Have students introduce themselves to class

Materials Needed:
Bank Observation Picture
Meal Observation Picture
Words in Color Sheet
Bank Checks