Citing classic psychological research and a smattering of recent studies, Kassin, Dror, and Kukucka (2013) proposed the operation of a forensic confirmation bias, whereby preexisting expectations guide the evaluation of forensic evidence in a self-verifying manner. In a series of studies, we tested the hypothesis that knowing that a defendant had confessed would taint people's evaluations of ha...

Various kinds of forensic evidential samples have been controlled by criminal laws and could not be destroyed carelessly, even if any analytical examinations should be needed on the samples, while those samples should be examined rapidly on the basis of the human rights of the concerned suspects or victims. Those evidential samples have been observed and have been examined by many forensic expe...

Printing material and prints undergo changes during ageing which can be recognized in deterioration in the physical, chemical and optical properties. The aim of this work is to determine the optical changes of the prints caused by ageing of the printing material and of the prints obtained by the application of the indirect electrophotography. The change of the screen elements in lighter halfton...

Procedures are reviewed and recommendations made for the choice of the size of a sample to estimate the characteristics (sometimes known as parameters) of a population consisting of discrete items which may belong to one and only one of a number of categories with examples drawn from forensic science. Four sampling procedures are described for binary responses, where the number of possible cate...

Molecular systematic botany is expanding its role in forensic science. DNA based techniques have been used in criminal cases to place a suspect at the crime scene, as well as to identify strains of marijuana (1,2). These studies have used DNA obtained from individual plant specimens of a known species and have not had to overcome problems associated with DNA mixtures of unkown plant composition...

Databases have been used to record data in forensic science, such as fingerprints, shoeprints, and photos. In traditional databases, we use "text" as the "keyword" for retrieving data (text-keyword retrieval); however, in some applications, "text" is not proper to describe the searching target, and in this case, "image" plays an important role. In this paper, we use "image features" as the "key...

Raman spectroscopy has become more popular due to its new prospective field applications in forensic sciences, war against terrorism, environment protection and other field chemical analysis. Raman spectrometers can be miniaturised to portable devices and their price is decreasing due to development of optoelectronics components. Unfortunately, this technology has still numerous limitations tha...

When Dr. Richard Feynman first gave the good news in 1959 that nanotechnology was on its way to change or perhaps transform the world of technology, many people might have considered his concepts too futuristic to be realized. Criminals, on the other hand, would not have known how effective nanotechnological tools would become in solving crimes in a few decades. Among some of the medical applic...

Likelihood ratios are increasingly being adopted to convey expert evaluative opinions to courts. In the absence of appropriate databases, many of these likelihood ratios will include verbal rather than numerical estimates of the support offered by the analysis. However evidence suggests that verbal formulations of uncertainty are a less effective form of communication than equivalent numerical ...