Forensic Culture Research Articles

Audio forensics behind the Iron Curtain: from raw sounds to expert testimony

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the construction of forensic audio expertise in the legal and security system of Communist Czechoslovakia and shows that the contested nature of speaker identification and sound-based objectivity contributed to the formulation of probabilistic claims in forensics. It explores the practices of the Department of Fonoscopy: a unique research laboratory of audio forensics that systematically examined the spectrographic, linguistic, and auditory means of sound analysis for the purpose of identifying unknown voices and environments in audio recordings. Bringing together the notions of “forensic cultures” and “sonic skills”, this article addresses the scientific, cultural, and political underpinning of the nascent field of audio expertise as well as the changing status of sound-based knowledge and forms of representation in forensics. In establishing fonoscopic expertise before the court and in the broader praxis of police investigation, the idea of vocal fingerprints and the use of sound visualisation technologies became instrumental. This essay pays special attention to the dynamics of the intricate process in which acoustic “raw material” (from anonymous calls, wiretapped phone lines, recorded conversations, or police interrogation rooms) was transformed into different kinds of legal and criminalistic evidence in the service of the totalitarian surveillance state.

Methodological bases and didactic tools of forensic culture of law enforcement: content of version analysis of criminal reality, development of a plan for forming evidence and tactical and methodological algorithms for their fixing

Analyzing the complex understanding of forensic culture as a phenomenon of the criminal law sphere, an attempt is made to highlight its methodological prerequisites and trace the didactic possibilities of forensic education. Law enforcement is understood as a process of restoring justice in public relations by following the trail of events of criminal reality, revealing their essence and proving the relationship between the traces found and the events that caused damage to people or nature. As a result, there is a personification of the responsibility of those persons who meaningfully or lightly irresponsibly reacted to the procedure for exercising their rights in public relations and thereby came into conflict with the law. The exceptional role of the stage of application of didactic means for the formation of skills and abilities to investigate individual manifestations of criminal reality is highlighted. Based on a comprehensive understanding of the trace space, due to the structuring of criminal reality and the ability to work with primary information, approaches to the versioned analysis of the event plan using a specialized map of forensic information analysis are distinguished. The developed didactic tools for special analytical training are divided into levels depending on their belonging to the elements of the methodology for investigating crimes. After characterizing the features of the map of forensic analysis of information, the features of the investigation planning procedure as a process of essential understanding of the stages of evidence formation are revealed, as well as tools for checking the completeness and validity of the evidence system are identified and characterized. In conclusion, the technology developed by the author for substantiating and making tactical decisions is characterized.

Transmission of Ancient Chinese Forensic Medicine in the West: The View from Xiyuan Jilu (Records for Vindication)

Chinese forensic medicine has a long and brilliant history, and the forensic knowledge in ancient China represents the world’s highest medicolegal level at the time. Among all extant essays and works on China’s early medical jurisprudence, Xiyuan Jilu (Records for Vindication) written by Song Ci in 1247 CE, during the Southern Song dynasty, is the oldest text on legal medicine in the world. Subsequently, this work went through successive editions and expansions. The book was not simply a manual providing instruction on conducting inquests; it also established standards for all judicial practices in ancient China. From the beginning of the 18th century, the earliest existing Yuan edition and subsequent editions of this book were translated. They contributed to the broad dissemination of ancient Chinese forensic culture in the West. By discussing the diffusion of Xiyuan Jilu and its corresponding studies in the Western world, this paper intends to expound on the cultural transmission of early Chinese forensic medicine, and reveal its values and impacts on the history and development of legal medicine worldwide to provide an illustrative example of Sino-Western medical and cultural exchange.

Методология и дидактика криминалистической культуры: основы структуризации криминальной реальности, анализа следового пространства и осмысления первичной информации

In the article, from the standpoint of a comprehensive understanding of the role of the forensic culture of law enforcement, the methodological prerequisites for the self-determination of forensic knowledge in the structure of criminal law sciences are traced. Law enforcement is considered as a process of restoring justice in public relations, expressed in the movement in the wake of the events of criminal reality, revealing the essence of the trace space and proving the compliance of the traces found with those events that caused damage to people or nature. The important role of the didactic stage in the formation of the forensic culture of law enforcement is emphasized. The complex essence of forensic education is revealed and the didactic means of forming a forensic culture of law enforcement are characterized. A comprehensive understanding of the vision of the trace space of criminal reality is given in relation to the sphere of crime investigation. The didactic stages of the formation of the forensic culture of law enforcement officers through training the ability to structure the criminal reality and its individual manifestations are singled out, and the special didactic tool “primary information comprehension scheme” developed at the Department of Criminalistics of the Nizhny Novgorod Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia is characterized. This didactic tool is considered in the context of the possibility of its use in the operational-combat thinking of an employee of the internal affairs bodies. In situations where the proposed mental algorithm can become the basis for the optimal actions of a police officer in a situation where it is necessary to instantly respond to emerging circumstances during combat contact with the use of various types of weapons and special means.:

Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body

This article explores the formation of what Christopher Hamlin has called a “forensic culture” in late nineteenth-century Japan, and its impact on the prosecution of crimes of sexual violence. Before the 1870s, acts of rape often went unpunished or were resolved through private monetary settlements between the victim and her family and the rapist. However, after the formation of the modern Japanese state in 1868, legal reform, an important aspect of the state-building process, created a new opportunity for victims to seek legal redress. Over the course of a decade, an unprecedented number of rapes were prosecuted, with most resulting in convictions and long prison terms for the perpetrators. That situation, however, changed as forensic medicine came to be institutionalized as a specific medical discipline and as part of the criminal justice system. Viewed by the police and jurists as modern, scientific, and rational, forensic medicine created a new standard for what counted as evidence, with the result that the testimony of the victim and others was devalued in favor of traces of blood, semen, and bodily injury—evidence that, as some contemporaries noted, ignored the reality of rape.

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin, eds. Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era

Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin, eds. Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era

Reading the Police File: Interiority and the Forensic Artefact

ABSTRACT This essay explores the challenges encountered in pursuing interdisciplinary research into forensic material culture, in particular the forensic photograph. Scholarly research projects which are also geared towards popular curatorial outcomes (public exhibitions, publications, digital media outputs) are subject to complex ethical and methodological considerations. Drawing on his own curatorial experience the author suggests that a major task in researching forensic material culture involves finding the ‘research question’ itself, or even more fundamentally, defining what precisely is the object of study. Arlette Farge delights in the revelations of everyday life offered by the eighteenth-century judicial archive, but what, the essay asks, of the more recent archival police matters, hovering on the cusp of memory and forgetting? In line with Farge’s idea that research may lead to a ‘remaking’ of the archive, the essay narrates the author’s experience of re-rendering, redescribing selected forensic images via the medium of pencil and charcoal drawing. It is suggested that the ‘research question’ and ‘object of study’ might be revealed, at least in part, via the manual acts and labours of such redescription, and the necessary long-term reflection and consideration such labour necessarily entails.

Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era. Edited by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) 346 pp. $64.95

<i>Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era</i>. Edited by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) 346 pp. $64.95

Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era ed. by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin

Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era ed. by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin

Review of: Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era

Review of: <i>Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era</i>

Ciencia y justicia en los tiempos del cólera: el misterio de los bizcochos de Torroja (1865)

A través de un caso de envenenamiento colectivo de 1865, se analizan cuatro ingredientes característicos de las culturas forenses: las tecnologías de la prueba, las voces autorizadas, el marco legislativo en acción y las ansiedades sociales predominantes. Se emplean noticias de prensa local y la documentación conservada en las academias de medicina de Barcelona y Madrid. El caso estudiado muestra las tensiones entre diversos tipos de pruebas y las ambigüedades en el diagnóstico de enfermedades epidémicas y envenenamientos. Se estudia, en primer lugar, los temores provocados por la epidemia de cólera de 1865, con el que se asociaron inicialmente las muertes. También se analizan los cambios de percepción en la población a través de las noticias aparecidas. Se reconstruye de este modo la situación que condicionó la investigación judicial y la labor posterior de los peritos. Se estudian las limitaciones económicas para la implantación del cuerpo de médicos forenses y las tensiones entre médicos y farmacéuticos respecto a la gestión de los diferentes tipos de pruebas.

Song Ci (1186–1249), “Father of World Legal Medicine”: History, Science, and Forensic Culture in Contemporary China

Song Ci (1186–1249) was an official of the Southern Song Dynasty best known for authoring the Collected Writings on the Washing Away of Wrongs (Xiyuan jilu), a work often hailed as the world's first systematic treatise on forensic medicine. While biographical details about his life were known in local history writings during the late imperial period, Song had garnered relatively little attention among those who handled forensic examinations, despite the fact that his work had impacted Chinese forensic practices for centuries. In modern times, by contrast, Song has been praised by historians and forensic professionals and viewed as a founding figure of the modern forensic sciences in China and, in the boldest claims, across the globe. Song has also become the subject of historical novels, television shows, and other popular media. This article examines the ways in which the historical image and meanings of Song Ci have been negotiated in China over the Republican period (1912–49) and after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It argues that a confluence of modern developments—new concepts of national and world history, the successful implementation of legal medicine in China, and the global popularity of forensics-themed popular culture—has given new meaning and importance to this thirteenth-century figure under the new conditions of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

De forensische wetenschap in Nederland (1800-1930): een terreinverkenning

Forensic science in the Netherlands (1800-1930): an exploration Focusing on the forensic culture of the Netherlands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article argues that historians of Dutch forensic medicine should go beyond institutional analyses of legal changes, and pay more attention to the practices of forensic medicine, psychiatry and criminalistics. During the nineteenth century, many doctors complained about the miserable state of Dutch forensic medicine. Several developments in the period 1910-1930, such as changes in the law that allocated more room for scientific expertise in the judicial process, played a pivotal role in the establishment of forensic science. Importantly, the field of criminalistics was designed and expanded by ‘the Dutch Sherlock Holmes’, the chemist dr. Co van Ledden Hulsebosch (1877-1952), who assisted the police in their investigation and was often called in by the courts as expert witness. He embodied a strict positivism, claiming to reveal the objective truth by studying objects and traces, the ‘silent witnesses’. At the same time, based on a study of court records, as well as journal and newspaper articles, this article shows that in practice the impact of scientific expertise in court differed. Criminalists professed other ideals of objectivity than psychiatrists and doctors.

Inroads to Outrounds: A Hofstedian Approach to Newcomer Integration into the Culture of Forensics

This study examines how newcomers to forensic competition in intercollegiate forensics integrate themselves into the larger community of competitors. Specifically, this study takes an intercultural approach and frames the forensic organization as a culture unto itself into which new arrivals must assimilate. To shed further light on this culture, this study determines where members of “forensic culture” are positioned on Hofstede’s cultural spectra. By modifying Hofstede’s original Values Module Survey and administering it to current competitors from around the country, insight can be gleaned into the cultural attitudes of the forensic organization, and the values that guide the practice of forensic culture. In light of these attitudes and values, suggestions for coaches to help their novices feel more at ease in collegiate forensics are offered.

3D Measuring of Complex Automotive Parts by Multiple Laser Scanning

Three-dimensional scanning is available for more than 15 years, however there are few that have heard of it and as few people know the applications of this technology. 3D scanning is also known as 3D digitizing, the name coming from the fact that this is a process that uses a contact or non-contact digitizing probe to capture the objects form and recreate them in a virtual workspace through a very dense network of points (xyz) as a 3D graph representation. Based on this information have been developed many new applications in many fields - computer games industry, prosthetics or forensic medicine, the arts and culture area - but the most common area where scanning systems are used remains the automotive industry, aircraft and consumer goods. Most automotive manufacturers currently use 3D metrology based on optical or laser systems to validate products quality. The pieces are initially measured by 3D scanning then they are compared with the designed model (CAD file) using a specialized software. By this comparison producer can interfere very quickly in the manufacturing process to remove the cause of defects, this technique being called Reverse Engineering (RE). The overall accuracy of a 3D acquisition system depends above all on the sensors precision and on the acquisition device (acquisition with contact) or acquisition structure (acquisition without contact). This accuracy may vary from micron to millimeter and the acquisitions size from a few points to several thousand points per second. In a perfect world or in an integrated production environment, 3D measuring systems should be able to measure all the necessary parameters in a single step without errors, and to render the results in the same way to the manufacturing networks equipped with computers, in formats useful for machines control and processes management.

Science, truth, and forensic cultures: The exceptional legal status of DNA evidence

Many epistemological terms, such as investigation, inquiry, argument, evidence, and fact were established in law well before being associated with science. However, while legal proof remained qualified by standards of ‘moral certainty’, scientific proof attained a reputation for objectivity. Although most forms of legal evidence (including expert evidence) continue to be treated as fallible ‘opinions’ rather than objective ‘facts’, forensic DNA evidence increasingly is being granted an exceptional factual status. It did not always enjoy such status. Two decades ago, the scientific status of forensic DNA evidence was challenged in the scientific literature and in courts of law, but by the late 1990s it was being granted exceptional legal status. This paper reviews the ascendancy of DNA profiling, and argues that its widely-heralded objective status is bound up with systems of administrative accountability. The ‘administrative objectivity’ of DNA evidence rests upon observable and reportable bureaucratic rules, records, recording devices, protocols, and architectural arrangements. By highlighting administrative sources of objectivity, this paper suggests that DNA evidence remains bound within the context of ordinary organisational and practical routines, and is not a transcendent source of ‘truth’ in the criminal justice system.

Forensic cultures in historical perspective: Technologies of witness, testimony, judgment (and justice?)

This article explores the history of forensic science in terms of ideologies and institutions rather than developing technique. It presents an analytical framework for characterising forensic institutions and practices, past and present. That framework highlights the distinct issues of means of witness, accredited testimony, and the reaching of juridical decisions. The article applies the framework by comparing four forensic ‘formations,’ (or ‘cultures’) which have been prominent at various times and places in the western world from the early modern period onward: these are the central European heritage of the Caroline code, a eugenically-oriented forensic enterprise of late nineteenth-century America, the forensic perspective in nineteenth-century British India, and the representation of forensic certainty in contemporary American popular culture. The article concludes with a critique of what seems an increasingly common expectation: that forensic science evolves independently of legal institutions, and can ultimately displace them.

Making space for criminalistics: Hans Gross and fin-de-siècle CSI

This article explores the articulation of a novel forensic object—the ‘crime scene’—and its corresponding expert—the investigating officer. Through a detailed engagement with the work of the late nineteenth-century Austrian jurist and criminalist Hans Gross, it analyses the dynamic and reflexive nature of this model of ‘CSI’, emphasising the material, physical, psychological and instrumental means through which the crime scene as a delineated space, and its investigator as a disciplined agent operating within it, jointly came into being. It has a further, historiographic, aim: to move away from the commonplace emphasis in histories of forensics on fin-de-siècle criminology and toward its comparatively under-explored contemporary, criminalistics. In so doing, it opens up new ways of thinking about the crime scene as a defining feature of our present-day forensic culture that recognise its historical contingency and the complex processes at work in its creation and development.

Forensic culture as epistemic culture: The sociology of forensic science

This paper explores whether we can interpret the notion of ‘forensic culture’ as something akin to what Knorr-Cetina called an ‘epistemic culture’. Can we speak of a ‘forensic culture’, and, if so, how is it similar to, or different from, other epistemic cultures that exist in what is conventionally called ‘science’? This question has important policy implications given the National Academy Science’s (NAS) recent identification of ‘culture’ as one of the problems at the root of what it identified as ‘serious deficiencies’ in U.S. forensic science and ‘scientific culture’ as an antidote to those problems. Finding the NAS’s characterisation of ‘scientific culture’ overly general and naïve, this paper offers a preliminary exploration of what might be called a ‘forensic culture’. Specifically, the paper explores the way in which few of the empirical findings accumulated by sociologists of science about research science seem to apply to forensic science. Instead, forensic science seems to have developed a distinct culture for which a sociological analysis will require new explanatory tools. Faithful sociological analysis of ‘forensic culture’ will be a necessary prerequisite for the kind of culture change prescribed by external reformist bodies like the NAS.