How justice and forensics are changing today

Any animal - mammals in particular but also simple vertebrates - protect their young. They will fight to the death to do so in some cases. But a monkey or elephant or gazelle, having its young killed, will sniff around the area for a while then move on.

The lion will fight for territory but will not pursue the jackal that kills its baby. What's done is done and you move on.

People are different.

We don't stop at the death or the kidnapping and shrug our shoulders, we want to pursue it and get justice and this has been ongoing for centuries.

Forensics and police work have grown and become far more sophisticated since the days of Roman justice or even of the Sherlock Homes and Mr Witcher days.

Foot prints, tire tracks, logic, cognitive science, forensics all have grown. A single cluster of skill cells from a cigarette butt or coffee cup can be used to make this determination. Finger print science too, you can get prints from a victim's skin or the inside of a glove.

We have dna science that goes far beyond blood or blood type to be able to determine that the blood belongs to a certain person with a certainty in the ratio of one to several billions.

Cadaver dogs- blood dogs - amazing work they do now.

Blood spatter and the story it tells of exactly how the blood was dropped or spilled or scattered or smeared.

The science of cadavers themselves - how long they've been where they are can be pinpointed to hours. Entomology, weather, the effects of animal and insect life on a cadaver, whether it's been left out in water or under ground.

Statement analyses -linguistics - including computer programs that call out suspicious statements, body language, handwriting that shows not only who left it but their emotional state when doing so.

Computer programs that show statistics on the likely killer.

Cognitive sciences and readings.

Psychological profiling of a killer based on the condition of the body, the wounds, the place and positioning where it was found.

Land and geoplogical patterning that shows the likely area for a body to be left depending on who the killer is - have gone far beyond "parents who kill their children leave their bodies within a mile or two of the house" - bird's eye view of an area can be mapped against other such killings and body dumpings to show patterns. All of this is being catalogued, the different areas are not shared in a single databse even in the US but they do exist.

pyschic - not to say science nor exactly art but discipline - including things that appear weird and other worldly -have grown to the point psychics are used in police investigations, certain psychics more than others and with better results - thinking of the two psychics who worked on the Laci Peterson case, one doing a reading that saw her exact trip to the SF Bay and being taken a mile from land and dumped and another that did some kind of bizarre seeming "voice patterns" reading in the white sound between spaces in a recording that had the reader rightly pinpointing the exact area where Laci's body was left, a mile offshore of Alameda Bulb; both put the husband as the killer in a violent murder and put the body exactly where the geological survey done by marine tide scientists said it would have been, to have washed up where and when it did.

It is a shame that we have focused so much on finding who did the killings rather than on how to prevent them, however we have what we have.

We have come a long way in identifying the likely killer/s in many cases. The law is on the side of the guilty, until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt, with all the protections of a court of law including against being forced to testify against themselves or illegal searches - they are protected under the notion that it's better to see 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted, and that's probably right. I wouldn't want anyone convicted of a crime they didn't do based on psychic readings nor statistics nor a dog's alert to human blood nor cadaverine - it's not enough. But it is a start.

But still the science is progressing with more progress in the last twenty years than in 200 years before, and the science 200 years ago was leaps ahead of where it was 2000 years ago.

Find the body and prove we killed her is a dangerous challenge to make these days and will be even more dangerous in a year or two. I think that's good news for anyone who is looking for justice after the fact. The real challenge is to prevent such killings by having as much progress made in that area as there is in the area of detection and proof after the fact.

This case has done nothing or even taken us backwards in that regard - prevention. And this seems to be down to the notion of reputation and thinking more of a person's right to a good reputation than for the rights of their children to be protected.

I forgot to add a very important factor in the way this is different now to how it used to be. We never had these crime shows nor the ability to pursue these stories ourselves via blogs, facebook, twitter and the like. This is vastly different from the days when you got told in the press what the press saw fit to report or had time to cover.

We have seen such huge strides in being able to have access to information - we can all scan a single article and find at least one misstatement; I know more than most reporters do about this case. Gerry's speech to Parliament had several mistatements that went unchallenged.

The ability to work together in a sort of neural network with people all over the world doing translations, contributing what they know or can do, has made a difference & will make more of one. One of our news channels here has asked people to take photos and videos if we see something gonig on that is news worthy and send it to them. The ability to get details on stories has just jumped incrementally, for the writers of the news but also for the average person.

Find the body and prove we killed her is a dangerous challenge to make these days and will be even more dangerous in a year or two. I think that's good news for anyone who is looking for justice after the fact. The real challenge is to prevent such killings by having as much progress made in that area as there is in the area of detection and proof after the fact.

This case has done nothing or even taken us backwards in that regard - prevention. And this seems to be down to the notion of reputation and thinking more of a person's right to a good reputation than for the rights of their children to be protected.

Good point widowan,

The challenge should be 'Find the child and prove she was abducted' imo.

And the focus should be as relates to the case they do have not the one they don't...


four years is nothing though. Things can happen long after the case is shelved - I think the publication of the book timing tells us they anticipate a need for legal funds and diverting public attention away from something and back to abduction, a strategy that has been used at critical points all along. I'm not convinced it's only Amaral's libel case.

People can retire, who have been in helpful positions to frustrate the investigation. Cases can be reopened not only at the parents' request but for other reasons. It ain't over til the fat lady sings.