The Rojas Murders of 1892 - Research Paper Example

Crime prevention presents a drain on limited budgets but this is considered as a necessary expense; otherwise, society breaks down. If prevention fails, law enforcement authorities have to resort to investigative techniques and forensic science to try to solve a crime that was committed. Forensics is the scientific and methodological gathering of evidence in the investigation of crimes with the aim of catching the criminal. The hope of eventually catching the real perpetrators of a crime depends to a big extent on how good the forensic investigator is.

There are essentially two steps involved which are the keen sense of making detailed or accurate observations of a crime scene and properly document those same observations. Forensics is usually undertaken by experienced police investigators and helped in large part by expert forensic scientists. The act of gathering crime scene evidence may not always make the case but certainly, a good forensic investigation, interpretation of the crime scene evidence and an astute analysis will always make a prosecution case much better.

In other words, good forensics can strengthen a weak case and help to catch a criminal based on anything left behind from the crime scene which would have otherwise escaped notice or detection. This paper talks and discusses on one such precedent-setting case in which fingerprint evidence was first used in a court case to convict a mother who killed her own two sons. Discussion Catching a criminal is always a risky business, risky in the sense that most crimes are committed in secret. A criminal is unlucky if he is not careful and is caught in the very act of the crime being committed, termed in Latin “in flagrante delicto” (originally used as euphemism for someone caught having sexual intercourse but has since been extended to the commission of any crime) and used in English and jurisprudence today as being “caught red handed.

” If this happens then the case could be considered as an “open and shut case” in which there are witnesses to the crime who can give their testimonies in open court and corroborate what they actually saw. However, majority of crimes are committed in secret with no witnesses to the crime and this is where forensic science can be a big help in solving the crime and catching the criminal. It is a highly-specialized field that requires the appropriate education, training, experience and use of good logic and deductive reasoning to be able to properly document the observations in crime scenes, preserve the evidence from tampering, prevent crime scenes from being inadvertently or intentionally altered and possibly reconstruct the most probable crime scenario to be able to give an expert opinion on what happened, how it happened and who did it.

The novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about a fictional detective named as Mr. Sherlock Holmes easily comes to mind when it comes to forensic investigative science and also of logical reasoning in arriving at an expert opinion in a classic whodunit. In crime cases where there are no witnesses, police investigators must rely on the crime scene evidence to try to pin down the criminals based on circumstantial evidence through deductive reasoning and inference. Correctly connecting the crime and the criminal essentially requires establishing the very presence of the criminal at the crime scene.

This is quite a tedious undertaking that calls for accuracy to remove any reasonable doubts. There is extreme