Pollution Crime Scenario Reconstruction for Effective Environmental Redress

Abstract

Dealing pollution cases as criminal offences requires proof beyond reasonable doubt for conviction. To meet this highest standard of evidentiary requirement, forensic professionals need to adopt the best tools and methods available to them. “Crime Scene Reconstruction” is a method adopted in traditional crimes to recreate the exact sequence of events leading to the crime from the physical evidences collected at the crime scene. This paper presents the adoption of the method of crime reconstruction to environmental crimes. All stages of traditional crime scene reconstruction, starting from recognition of physical evidence from the scene, its identification and individualization, collection of data, hypothesis formulation, it’s testing and final reconstruction are explained in the context of environmental crimes. An effective method to apply in the reconstruction of an environmental crime scene must rely on several experts of different scientific domains who are united in defining, through the search for evidences, the causal link that connects the “victim”, the “guilt” and the “perpetrator”. Often, the difficulty in such reconstruction is because the perpetrator’s motive is not really connected to environmental aspects, but only the consequential effects are revealed in the environment. However, even if the actions that caused the damage to the environment were not the real motive of the perpetrator, this does not redeem him from the responsibility of associated environmental crimes, but makes the process of reconstructing the crime more complex, especially in the search for the cause-effect relationship. The activity related to the analysis of an environmental crime scene is to be considered a situational awareness activity that aims to evaluate not only a specific action in a scene but the entire dynamics of a complex scenario. Considering the complexities that are characteristic of environmental crimes, we propose one more stage in addition to the general stages of traditional crime reconstruction, that of presenting the reconstructed scenario in a way that is easy for the legal fraternity to comprehend. Finally, the entire procedure of reconstruction is demonstrated using an actual case.