Forensic Science Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards for review.

Forensic Science

The science of associating people, places, and things involved in criminal activities; these scientific disciplines assist in investigating and adjudicating criminal and civil cases.

Criminalistics

The branch of forensic science that involves the collection and analysis of physical evidence generated by criminal activity. It includes areas such as drugs, firearms and toolmarks, fingerprints, blood and body fluids, footwear, and trace evidence.

Trace Evidence

Evidence such as fire and explosive residues, glass, soils, hairs, fibers, paints, plastics and other polymers, wood, metals, and chemicals.

Anthropometry (Bertillonage)

A method of recording physical features of a person in such a way that the record would be unique to that person.

Chain of Custody

Documentation of who had what items of evidence and when, from the smallest fiber to an entire car.

FORESIGHT Project

A project where volunteer laboratories in local, state, and national jurisdictions across North America submit standardized business measures for analysis, and this provides a comparison between laboratories’ effectiveness ('benchmarking').

ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials, International)

Publishes voluntary consensus standards for a wide variety of sciences, including forensic science.

ISO 17025

The standard for accreditation in the United States for forensic science laboratories; General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories.

Datum

A fixed reference point for all three-dimensional measurements at a crime scene.

Artifact

A human-made or modified portable object found at a crime scene.

Feature

A non-portable artifact at a crime scene, such as a fire pit, a house, or a garden.

Organic or Environmental Remains

Natural remnants that nonetheless indicate human activity, such as animal bones or plant remains but also soils and sediments.

Provenance

The origin and derivation of an item in three-dimensional space, in relation to a datum and other items at a crime scene.

Crime Scene Investigator (CSI)

A professional who processes crime scenes, collecting items, evidence.

Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS)

Provides information on the hazards of a particular material so that personnel can work safely and responsibly with hazardous materials.

Bloodborne Pathogens (BBPs)

Infectious microorganisms in human blood that can cause disease in humans.

Universal Precautions

Measures that require employees to treat all human blood, body fluids, or other potentially infectious materials as if they are infected with diseases such as hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Evidence

Information—whether in the form of personal testimony, the language of documents, or the production of material objects—that is given in a legal investigation to make a fact or proposition more or less likely.

Demonstrative Evidence

Items of evidence created to augment or explain real evidence, such as diagrams of hair characteristics or a computer simulation of a crime scene.

Proxy Data

The remnants of a transaction from transfer evidence.

Direct transfer

Evidence that is transferred from a source to a location with no intermediaries; it has transferred from A to B.

Indirect Transfer

Transfer that involves one or more intermediate objects—the evidence transfers from A to B to C.

Contamination

An undesired transfer of information between items of evidence.

Identification

The examination of the chemical and physical properties of an object and using them to categorize the object as a member of a group.

Class

A group of objects with similar characteristics.

Common Source

The origin of two or more pieces of evidence, depending on the material in question, the mode of production, and the specificity of the examinations used to classify the object.

Individualization

Categorizing an item in a set or class that has one and only one member.

Known Evidence

Evidence whose source is known.

Questioned Evidence

Evidence whose source is unknown.

Coincidental Associations

Two things which previously have never been in contact with each other have items on them which are analytically indistinguishable at a certain class level.

Comparison

The process done to try to establish the source of evidence. The questioned evidence is compared with objects whose source is known.

Positive Control

A material that is expected to give a positive result with the test reagents and serves to show that the test is working properly.

Negative Control

A control where it is expected that the results of the test would come out negative.

False Positive (Type I error)

Concluding that the stain is blood when it is not.

False Negative (Type II error)

A person may be falsely exonerated from a crime that he or she really did commit.

Testability

The questions that are asked must be testable

Repeatability

Other scientists must be able to take the same kinds of samples and methods, repeat your experiments, and get the same results for it to be science.

Hypotheses

The particular questions to be tested

Probative value

The data will be carefully examined to determine what value they have in proving or disproving the hypothesis

Trier of fact

Whoever determines guilt or innocence

Locard Exchange Principle

When two things come into contact, information is exchanged.