Crime Scene Investigations and Death Investigations - Research Paper Example

With the population of television shows dealing with criminal activity, either real or imagined, the public has taken on quite a bit of ‘knowledge’ about what goes on when investigating a crime scene and dealing with all the varied components of forensics (“Bones”) and the DNA left behind by the perpetrators. Yet, while crime scene shows can investigate and solve murders in one hour, the real aspect of the crime scene investigation (CSI) takes quite a bit longer because evidence must be taken carefully and a suspect found, and there must be no doubt as to who is guilty. When a suspect has been arrested and is finally presented in court, the evidence must be irrefutable to make a final conviction. That also means that if evidence or the crime scene itself is contaminated in any way, then a potential conviction will get thrown out the door. Consequently, there are a number of problems that can occur at any given point along the way in a crime scene investigation which this research will examine.

In today’s world of electronic and scientific advances, much of this new technology has been applied to the detailing of evidence in any criminal investigation. Even social media phenomena such as Facebook and other social media outlets have also turned into a way for criminal investigators to track down evidence that can be applied in building a case against a suspected criminal. It may be as simple as whether the criminal was astute enough to know how to work the settings in Facebook so as to not be tracked at a certain location at a particular point in time – or not. Or maybe a suspect carelessly ranted online about a certain professor at his college and two days later, that professor is dead. Such things as that rant can be applied to incriminate a likely suspect. Yet the crime scene evidence must also back that up with evidence or else there is no real case, only suspicion. Subsequently, the procedures of processing a crime scene must be adhered to in order to build the case in profiling a suspect, and finally, convict him or her.

A crime scene can be different from one case to the next such as a room with blood spatters, a telephone booth used on a regular basis for making drug-related calls, or just finding a cell phone with phone numbers on it leading to private numbers of people in the local mafia. Accordingly, how long one spends there depends on the criminal case itself and on backtracking to other points within the criminal investigation such as the home of the cell phone’s owner and finding out where everyone, listed in the cell phone database, lives (Genge, 2002).