Team:Dundee/Practices
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Overview
Over the course of our project we have spoken to a wide range of experts, from the crime scene to the court room, to help develop our forensic toolkit into something we hope will have useful real world applications.
This outreach has included meeting some of the world’s best forensic researchers to discuss ideas, defence lawyers to find out what criteria our toolkit would need to meet to be used in a court of law, we even met with an award winning crime author to hear his thoughts on the importance of the public perception of forensic science. We were very lucky to chat with a crime scene investigator, to draw from his years of experience in the field and find out whether he thought our toolkit would be useful, practical, and an improvement on current techniques. Finally, we met with manufacturers to find out a bit more about that side of designing a forensic toolkit.
Towards the tail end of our project we gained a spot on BBC Radio Scotland and on Scottish TV News (STV) to promote our project, iGEM and synthetic biology to a wider audience.
News Reel
Professor Sue Black, OBE FRSE, is a Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology as well as the director of CAHID (Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at University of Dundee). We met with Sue early on to discuss the basis of our project, the forensic toolkit. She was very supportive and offered to help us in any way she could. She stated that “there is science and then there is forensics”. Her view is that forensics is only the communication of science in the courtroom to a particular end and forensics needs a more scientific background. Over the years many forms of evidence such as hair, fibre and even DNA analysis have been discredited or discarded. A rigorous and robust technique, especially dating of evidence, would strengthen the basis of forensics. This highlighted the lack of scientific rigour within the field and encouraged us to do our best to meet this real need for techniques that can stand up to peer review.
Ethics
One reason why ethics is so important in the field of forensic science is because the criminal justice system relies so heavily on forensic evidence. Forensic evidence can make or break a case and in doing so, have a great impact on the lives of others. If one piece of evidence is mishandled or misinterpreted, it could lead to a person's life being changed dramatically or prevent justice from being served. Because the general public make up the jury, the public’s perception of forensic science is incredibly important as it can have a big impact on the outcome of a court case. Some people in the general public may see forensic evidence as absolute truth, without taking into consideration the error present in all scientific methods. Forensic scientists call this the ‘CSI effect’ because TV shows like this tend to overstate the capabilities of forensic techniques. In reality sometimes the evidence collected and presented is down to expert interpretation rather than scientifically robust analysis. For example, blood spatter patterns, hair and fibre analysis, firearm and tool marks are commonly depicted on CSI. These techniques rely on the judgment of individual experts and can’t really be validated with statistics. In other words, these techniques are not particularly scientifically robust. So of course, results from tests such as these which can sway the jury are actually not reliable and this can lead to miscarriages of justice which could happen to anyone. This is where the innocence project comes in. The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people. So far over 300 cases have been exonerated in the USA, of which 18 were on death row. And they state that 47% of the exonerated cases were due to improper forensic science. This is one of the reasons we became so passionate about our project. We decided that we wanted to take a different approach to forensics and put science first. We came up with the idea of creating a robust, useful and easy to use set of techniques for crime scene analysis - our forensic toolkit, which we hope, can help prevent these wrongful convictions and bring perpetrators to justice.
