This post was written by William after his successful St Edward’s Scholarship Exams
The forensic aspect to police work (cutting people open in connection to crimes etc.) is also closely related to science. The police have been very lucky to find exceptionally good forensic doctors over the past years, which have helped them to identify many criminals. Although there has been a lot of success with forensics, there have also been techniques which held no merit whatsoever. One of these is the “Comparative Bullet-Lead Analysis”, which was started by the Kennedy Assassination in 1963. The idea of each bullet having a specific chemical makeup that could be traced back to a single box of ammunition was introduced by the FBI, and was used for four decades. Though this seemed to be a major breakthrough in science, independent studies from the National Academy of Sciences proved this wrong, and it was abandoned by the FBI in 2005.
Forensic science has not always been accepted as “correct”. A post in the New York Times stated that:
“No one has proved even the basic assumption: That everyone’s fingerprint is unique.”
And also that:
“Now such assumptions are being questioned – and with it may come a radical change in how forensic science is used by police departments and prosecutors.”
These discoveries would almost certainly revolutionise science as we know it, as, if everyone’s fingerprints were the same, or sufficiently similar, that scientists or even the police could not identify separate ones out of a large group, then a large portion of both police assimilation technology and fingerprint scanners, identity cards etc. would be basically useless. There have been other instances where people have said that “Forensic evidence is not uniquely immune from the risk of manipulation.” – Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court, 25th June 2009. This is true, as all information can be manipulated. There is no enterprise which is immune to change.
Forensic sciences are a good way to identify a particular person, but they are also prone to mistakes, as even the slightest miscalculation or mistake could lead to a false conviction by the police and the release of the real criminal (if a man is convicted of a crime, another person under suspicion could be let loose, even if they are the real guilty felon). So, even if the techniques are sound, forensics will not always be favoured by the nation.
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