August 2017 - Page 25 of 30 - searchfortruth.info

Forensic Science and the Charles Manson Murders

February 15, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

The capture and conviction of Charles Manson took over one and a half years to complete. Within this time period many law enforcement officers and forensics professionals put in countless numbers of hours collecting, preserving and testing the physical evidence they found. In addition, the forensics practices used in this case as well as the police investigation techniques serve as a valuable lesson for those in these fields today. In this paper we will look at some of the crimes that were committed by the Manson Family, the mishandled investigation that followed and the forensic techniques used to aid (and sometimes hinder the efforts) in obtaining convictions against those involved. The first five murders, later to be called the "Tate" murders, occurred in a house high above the city of Los Angeles. One victim (Steven Parent) was found in his car outside the house and he had been shot four times and stabbed once. Another two victims (Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski) were

Distinguishing Between True and False Confessions

November 9, 2018August 6, 2017 by admin

The impact of a confession on a jury in a capital case is so powerful that a defense attorney who does not attempt to suppress it risks charges of providing inadequate counsel. While there are legal safeguards afforded a defendant at trial to refute the voluntariness or trustworthiness of a professed confession, a false confession should be recognized long before it is entered into evidence against an innocent defendant. Ultimately there responsibility of determining whether a confession is true or false falls upon the investigator who obtained it.A widely known critic of police interrogation addressed an audience and stated that in his years of reviewing confessions he has seen both non-coerced reliable confessions and confessions from innocent people who were convinced by the police that they were guilty. He went on to state that if he distributed ten of those confessions to everyone in the audience and had them place the confessions into two piles, five of which were true confessions and five of which were false...

Criminal Profiling from Crime Scene Analysis

February 14, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

INTRODUCTION: HISTORY OF CRIMINAL PROFILING

Criminal profiling has been used successfully by law enforcement in several areas and is a valued means by which to narrow the field of investigation. Profiling does not provide the specific identity of the offender. Rather, it indicates the kind of person most likely to have committed a crime by focusing on certain behavioral and personality characteristics. Profiling techniques have been used in various settings such as hostage taking (Reiser. 1982). Law enforcement officers need to learn as much as possible about the hostage taker in order to protect the lives of the hostages. In such cases, police are aided by verbal contact (although often limited) with the offender and possibly by access to his family and friends. They must be able to assess the subject in terms of what course of action he is likely to take and what his reactions to various stimuli might be. Profiling has been used also in identifying anonymous letter writers (Casey-Owens 1983) and

Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations

March 5, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

Abstract

Recent DNA exonerations have helped shed light on the problem of false confessions and the empirical fact that innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on past and current police practices, laws concerning the admissibility of confession evidence in court, relevant core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving an array of empirical methodologies, this White Paper summarizes much of what we know about police-induced confessions. AS part of this review, we identify dispositional suspect characteristics (e.g., adolescence; intellectual disability; mental illness, and certain personality traits), interrogation tactics (e.g., excessive interrogation time; presentations of false evidence; minimization), and the phenomenology of innocence (e.g., the tendency to waive Miranda rights) that can influence the reliability of confessions, as well as their effects on judges, juries, and other decision makers. This article concludes with a strong recommendation for the mandatory videotaping of interrogations and considers other possibilities...

Classifying Crimes by Severity: From Aggravators to Depravity

December 27, 2018August 6, 2017 by admin

Crime classification, indeed this manual, underlines the oft-overlooked reality that each murder, rape, arson, and other criminal act distinguishes itself. Contract killing is quite obviously different from sexual homicide, for example. Crime-solving considerations force investigators to appreciate the differences between offenses according to the perpetrator’s background, crime scene evidence, victimology, and forensic findings. Distinguishing subtypes of crime enables various organs of law enforcement to effect justice. “Justice.” What does that word truly signify? To be involved in the justice system is to be humbled by one’s discrete role in a process that extends well beyond a suspect’s arrest. Is justice served merely when a suspect is taken into custody? What if a manslaughter is charged as a murder? What if a cold-blooded killer is prosecuted as a battered woman? Is that justice? Obviously not. Nor is it “justice” to presume that even within all subtypes of offenders, each is as blameworthy as the next. Each of us who impart our experiences in this text viscerally

Impulsive versus Premeditated Aggression: Implications for Mens Rea Decisions

February 14, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

Science can provide more information about the nature of aggressive acts, and therefore the mens rea of criminal offenses, than is commonly assumed. For example, progress has been made in classifying aggression as impulsive or premeditated within the context of the role of conscious experience in controlling behavior. This review of the status of the scientific ability to distinguish conscious from unconscious acts and more specifically impulsive from premeditated aggressive acts is organized around four themes: (i) How is aggression defined and measured in general? (ii) How does the distinction between impulsive and premeditated aggression relate to the legal concept of mens rea? (iii) How do various scientific disciplines con-tribute to the mind/body discourse? (iv) What risk factors are associated with impulsive and premeditated aggression respectively? The authors conclude that the most promising approach to researching the nature of behavioral intention and motivation is to apply a discipline neutral model that integrates the data from multiple disciplines, collectively designated the cognitive neurosciences. Copyright#2003 John...

The Forensics of Blood

February 19, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

After a homicide or an assault has been committed, police investigators usually find blood at the scene of the crime, giving them clues as to what happened. The blood’s texture and shape and how it is distributed around the victim often help investigators determine when the crime was committed, whether the crime was preceded by a fight between individuals, and which weapon was used say, a knife, a gun, or an object used to hit a person. But criminals have tried many ways to hide, clean up, and remove blood evidence. For example, what looks like blood may be another substance placed there by the criminal to mislead police investigators. Also, some criminals clean up the blood from the crime scene or move the victim’s body somewhere else, making it harder to reconstruct what really happened. To take these potential scenarios into account, forensic scientists who apply the latest scientific discoveries to law have developed techniques that can tell whether the

Logic and Research Versus Intuition and Past Practice as Guides to Gathering and Evaluating Eyewitness Evidence

February 18, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

Like many issues in the psychology–law area, when it comes to eyewitness evidence, researchers see an obvious opportunity to help solve a problem—in this case, to maximize the rate of accurate information and identification decisions while at the same time minimizing the rate of mistakes. Psychology is especially well suited to this task, given its interest in the psychological aspects of eyewitness evidence, such as attention (e.g., studying an assailant’s face while being assaulted vs. learning only later that a bank customer committed fraud by passing a bad check), perception (e.g., of color, distance, height, speed), memory (e.g., length of retention interval, interference, source monitoring), decision making (e.g., determining the odds of a witness choosing a suspect by chance), interpersonal communication (e.g., witness interviews), and attribution theory (e.g., a witness wonders why she has been asked a particular question or shown a particular lineup). So, to address the legal system’s “problem,”...

Polygraph Verification Test

February 18, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

Abstract

This paper involves fifty-one re-examinations of original polygraph tests that resulted in conflicted outcomes and examinations where deliberate distortions were believed to have been employed. The Polygraph Validation Test (PVT) was successfully employed in these re-examinations to rectify the original problems and/or confirm attempts by examinees at countermeasures or augmentations.

Additional Resource: Using the Polygraph Validation Test (PVT) in Solving Conflicted Polygraph Results and Confirming Deliberate Distortions by Examinees (2970 downloads )

The Role of Brain Fingerprinting in Criminal Proceedings

February 17, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

The application of Brain Fingerprinting® testing in a criminal case involves four phases: investigation, interview, scientific testing, and adjudication. Of these four phases, only the third one is in the domain of science. The first phase is undertaken by a skilled investigator, the second by an interviewer who may be an investigator or a scientist, the third by a scientist, and the fourth by a judge and jury.

This is similar to the forensic application of other sciences. For example, if a person is found dead of unknown causes, first there is an investigation to determine if there may have been foul play. If there is a suspect involved, the suspect is interviewed to determine what role, if any, he says he has had in the situation. If the investigation determines that the victim may have been poisoned using ricin or cadmium, two rare and powerful poisons, then scientific tests can be conducted to detect these specific substances in the body. Then the evidence

Identifying Facial Markings

January 20, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

As early as 1200 BCE, the ancient Egyptians were practicing a range of restorative techniques on the emaciated features of the dead from filling the inside of the mouths with sawdust to improve hollowed cheeks to stuffing linen under the eyelids or replacing eyes with stones. They would continue this procedure, tending to any disability, injury or disfigurement until the face and the body were contoured to approximate the original features and shape of the person they were preparing for their death ceremony.

Since then, modern restorative techniques, renamed restorative arts in 1930, became an important sub-discipline of the aftercare services; mending the body when it exhibited obvious signs of trauma, disease or wounds from war to provide comfort to the bereaved by presenting a loved one who appears familiar in death as they did in life.

It was in 1912, when well-known embalmer, Joel E. Crandall introduced demisurgery, a practice he described as “the art of building or creating parts of...

Additional Resource: A Brief History Of Restoratie Arts

PARTNERS IN CRIME A Comparison of Individual and Multi-Perpetrator Homicides

December 28, 2018August 6, 2017 by admin

Homicide is a heterogeneous crime associated with diverse contexts, motives, offender– victim relationships, and offender characteristics. Although cleared at a higher rate than that of other violent crimes likely because of the resources channeled into such investigations (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007) homicide remains poorly understood, and stranger homicides in particular can be challenging for investigators (Dauvergne & Li, 2006). In 2006, the United States experienced an estimated 17,034 homicides, only 60% of which were cleared by police investigation and, most typically, the arrest of at least one person (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007). In Canada, 70% of solved homicides between 1991 and 2005 were cleared within 1 week of the incident, with the likelihood of success dropping drastically after that time. Given the urgency associated with a homicide investigation and the temporal constraints associated with a positive outcome, a valuable asset to investigators would be the ability to predict perpetrator characteristics based on the crime scene and the victim left behind. If specific

Child Pornography, Prostitution And Predators: Has The Internet Placed Our Children At Risk?

February 17, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

INTRODUCTION

Child exploitation and abuse is not a new phenomenon and has occurred since the beginning of time in all societies irrespective of culture, race, ethnicity, economic strength, religion and many other factors. The abuse of children can take many forms including physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse and neglect. Nearly one million children are victims of child abuse and neglect in the United States each year. Every day nearly four children die as a result of abuse and neglect, most under the age of five. Globally, the number of maltreated children, the various ways in which they are maltreated and the differing ways in which societies define maltreatment or abuse make it difficult to enact standards which protect children from abuse and maltreatment. The molestation and sexual exploitation of children has been identified as a major public health issue. One in four girls and at least one in ten boys are sexually abused in some way by the age of 18.

Remorse, Apology, and Mercy

February 17, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

I. INTRODUCTION

It is commonly even if not universally believed that the very worst of evildoers are those who are utterly without remorse for the evil that they have done an absence often understandably inferred from their unwillingness to express remorse by apologizing or begging forgiveness or by their not engaging in appropriate non-verbal expressive behavior seeking out punishment, for example. Such absence of remorse may, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, be a “sign of bestiality” or, in the phrase of Seamus Heaney, reveal them as “malignant by nature.” In the legal world, such judgments can be found at various points in the criminal process—where absence of remorse may be cited as an aggravating factor that legitimately should incline us to greater harshness and certainly not to greater compassion or mercy. Here are a few examples one from a clemency decision, one from a prosecuting attorney’s argument at the sentencing stage of a criminal trial, one from a trial judge justifying a sentence, one from a

Motivated Thinking

February 17, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

At one time or another, every one of us has engaged in “wishful thinking,” or “let our hearts influence our heads.” That is, every one of us has felt the effects of our motivations on our thought processes. Given this common everyday experience, it is not surprising that an essential part of early psychological research was the idea that drives, needs, desires, motives, and goals can profoundly influence judgment and reasoning. More surprising is that motivational variables play only a small role in current theories of reasoning. Why might this be? One possible explanation is that since the cognitive revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers studying motivational and cognitive processes have been speaking somewhat different languages. That is, there has been a general failure to connect traditional motivational concepts, such as drives or motives, to information processing concepts, such as expectancies or spreading activation, which form the foundation for nearly all contemporary research on thinking and reasoning.