Forensic Sciences

Serial Number

Introduction Serial numbers are present on many everyday objects. They are used to distinguish items from others of a similar appearance. In most instances, they are simply a sequential number, which describes how many units in a particular production sequence have been produced. In some cases, they are encoded to carry information about the product, […]

Footwear Marks

Introduction Footwear leaves its marks and impressions through direct physical contact, in or on the surfaces over which it tracks. They are left in a large variety of two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms and are accurately sized representations of the footwear that caused them. Some impressions are more easily detected than others. Most are remarkably durable […]

Bare Footprint Marks

Introduction Many crimes are committed where the culprit must walk around the crime scene leaving telltale footwear impressions and at times, barefoot impressions, so there are a number of instances where the examination of a footprint recovered at a crime scene can be extremely important. Forensic barefoot morphology involves the comparison of the weight-bearing areas […]

'Plastic' Bag Striations

Introduction Plastics in general, and plastic bags and films in particular, are in common use in a large variety of daily activities. As a result, they are frequently employed in relation to the commission of crime, the most obvious example being packaging material in drug trafficking cases. The ability to compare and ultimately identify plastic […]

Preservation of Evidence

Introduction It is now over 70 years since Locard laid down the first principle of crime scene management, ‘every contact leaves a trace’. With recent advances in fingerprint retrieval, footwear impression enhancement by electrostatic methods, and the ability to recover DNA from even a single cell, the avoidance of contamination has achieved prime importance. Indeed, […]

Victim Recovery

Introduction The way in which a body is retrieved from a crime scene, preserved and transported can greatly affect the appearance and subsequent evaluation of any evidence or injury. Therefore, the officer in charge of the crime scene, the forensic pathologist and the body transporter must liaise to ensure the body is handled and transported […]

Postmortem Changes

Introduction The clinical diagnosis of death is beyond the scope of this article. ‘Death’, as generally understood, is the extinction of personality, accompanied by the loss of vital signs such as heart beat, reflexes and respiration. This is known as ‘somatic death’. Thereafter, cellular death follows over a period of time. The survival of individual […]

Postmortem Interval

Introduction Evidence of the time elapsed since death, the postmortem interval, may come from three sources: (1) the body of the deceased; (2) the environment in the vicinity of the body; and (3) information on the deceased’s habits, movements, and day-to-day activities. All three sources of evidence (corporal, environmental and anamnestic) should be explored and […]

Histopathology

Histology (the microscopical examination of tissues) forms an integral part of modern pathological investigation. In 1991, the British Royal College of Pathologists issued guidelines for the performance and reporting of hospital autopsies in which it was stated that ‘an autopsy is incomplete without histological examination of all major organs’. The same is true of the […]

Autopsy

Introduction The autopsy, or necropsy as it is sometimes known in Britain, is a postmortem dissection of the body. The literal meaning of autopsy is ‘to see for oneself’. Autopsies are of two types: those performed in a hospital setting for purely medical purposes, and those performed under legal authority for forensic purposes. The ‘hospital’ […]

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