Why are programs such as CSI, Law & Order, and Cold Case so popular? Because our culture is fascinated with crime—and these television shows reveal investigators' procedures and secrets. With so many forensic-based television programs, it might seem that North America's morbid curiosity is a new phenomenon. The truth is, however, that humanity have always been fascinated by that which also frightens them. What's more, humans are attracted to puzzles—and forensic science offers opportunities to solve mysteries while at the same time "catching the bad guys." Modern media has only magnified the tendencies of previous generations. This book takes a look at the ways this fascination with crime shapes modern news media, television programming, movies, and the Internet. It also provides information on the real-life opportunities for forensic careers. Forensic science is more than just a cultural obsession—it's a fast-growing professional field. Forensics in American Culture will reveal this field's intriguing mixture of science, mystery, excitement, and justice.
Essays explore forensic science in global and historical context, opening a critical window onto contemporary debates about the universal validity of present-day genomic forensic practices. Contemporary forensic science has achieved unprecedented visibility as a compelling example of applied expertise. But the common public view—that we are living in an era of forensic deliverance, one exemplified by DNA typing—has masked the reality: that forensic science has always been unique, problematic, and contested. Global Forensic Cultures aims to rectify this problem by recognizing the universality of forensic questions and the variety of practices and institutions constructed to answer them. Groundbreaking essays written by leaders in the field address the complex and contentious histories of forensic techniques. Contributors also examine the co-evolution of these techniques with the professions creating and using them, with the systems of governance and jurisprudence in which they are used, and with the socioeconomic, political, racial, and gendered settings of that use. Exploring the profound effect of "location" (temporal and spatial) on the production and enactment of forms of forensic knowledge during the century before CSI became a household acronym, the book explores numerous related topics, including the notion of burden of proof, changing roles of experts and witnesses, the development and dissemination of forensic techniques and skills, the financial and practical constraints facing investigators, and cultures of forensics and of criminality within and against which forensic practitioners operate. Covering sites of modern and historic forensic innovation in the United States, Europe, and farther-flung imperial and global settings, these essays tell stories of blood, poison, corpses; tracking persons and attesting documents; truth-making, egregious racism, and sinister surveillance. Each chapter is a finely grained case study. Collectively, Global Forensic Cultures supplies a historical foundation for the critical appraisal of contemporary forensic institutions which has begun in the wake of DNA-based exonerations. Contributors: Bruno Bertherat, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, Binyamin Blum, Ian Burney, Marcus B. Carrier, Simon A. Cole, Christopher Hamlin, Jeffrey Jentzen, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Quentin (Trais) Pearson, Mitra Sharafi, Gagan Preet Singh, Heather Wolffram
This book identifies, traces, and interrogates contemporary American culture's fascination with forensic science. It looks to the many different sites, genres, and media where the forensic has become a cultural commonplace. It turns firstly to the most visible spaces where forensic science has captured the collective imagination: crime films and television programs. In contemporary screen culture, crime is increasingly framed as an area of scientific inquiry and, even more frequently, as an area of concern for female experts. One of the central concerns of this book is the gendered nature of expert scientific knowledge, as embodied by the ubiquitous character of the female investigator. Steenberg argues that our fascination with the forensic depends on our equal fascination with (and suspicion of) women's bodies—with the bodies of the women investigating and with the bodies of the mostly female victims under investigation.
"David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example performance and installation art, as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones's analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity which has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charriáere, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory"--
Bestselling author of Broken Ground “offers fascinating glimpses” into the real world of criminal forensics from its beginnings to the modern day (The Boston Globe). The dead can tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died, and, of course, who killed them. Using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene, or the faintest of human traces, forensic scientists unlock the mysteries of the past and serve justice. In Forensics, international bestselling crime author Val McDermid guides readers through this field, drawing on interviews with top-level professionals, ground-breaking research, and her own experiences on the scene. Along the way, McDermid discovers how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine one’s time of death; how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer; and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist were able to uncover the victims of a genocide. Prepare to travel to war zones, fire scenes, and autopsy suites as McDermid comes into contact with both extraordinary bravery and wickedness, tracing the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.
Here is the story of the process by which competitive speech and debate evolved in the United States during the 20th Century. This authoritative history shows how forensics, as practiced in the United States, was an uneasy fusion of contradictory premises that began as a significant part of the tradition of American public address: The need for preparing students to participate in democratic governance in conflict with a student’s need to express personal and competitive impulses. Forensics represented a push and pull between an activity simultaneously considered to be both a public and a private good. The book: identifies the themes and trends of American forensics within an overarching chronological framework; reveals the impact of American forensics on the communication discipline, as well as America’s social and educational systems; concentrates on the elements of social history that contributed to organizational development, leadership, and politics; and, provides a base line reflecting the influences of both American culture in particular, and western culture in general, for cross-cultural comparisons between processes and effects of forensics as a form of education. While intrinsically valuable as part of a comprehensive understanding of the history of higher education in the United States in the 20th Century, Forensics in America: A History is significant in providing a context for understanding the role forensics may play in the 21st Century. The book expands the study of American public address, focuses on the pedagogy of forensics training, and explores cultural dimensions of forensics activities.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death offers readers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a master criminal investigator. Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy grandmother, founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen Nutshell dioramas, on a scale of 1:12, display an astounding level of detail: pencils write, window shades move, whistles blow, and clues to the crimes are revealed to those who study the scenes carefully. Corinne May Botz's lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Frances Lee's models and breathe life into these deadly miniatures, which present the dark side of domestic life, unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery. The accompanying line drawings, specially prepared for this volume, highlight the noteworthy forensic evidence in each case. Botz's introductory essay, which draws on archival research and interviews with Lee's family and police colleagues, presents a captivating portrait of Lee.
' Kate Winkler Dawson is an unbelievable crime historian and such a talented storyteller. ' Karen Kilgariff, cohost of the My Favorite Murder podcast 'Heinrich changed criminal investigations forever, and anyone fascinated by the myriad detective series and TV shows about forensics will want to read [this].' The Washington Post 'An entertaining, absorbing combination of biography and true crime.' Kirkus ' Kate Winkler Dawson has researched both her subject and his cases so meticulously that her reconstructions and descriptions made me feel part of the action rather than just a reader and bystander. She has brought to life Edward Oscar Heinrich's character, determination, and skill so vividly that one is left bemused that this man is so little known to most of us. ' Patricia Wiltshire, author of Traces and The Nature of Life and Death Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities – beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners and hundreds of books – sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the 'American Sherlock Holmes', Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of the greatest – and first – forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock is a true-crime account capturing the life of the man who spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools, including blood-spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence.
Saney cogently argues that in the absence of adequate support within social and legal norms, a heavy burden is placed upon the criminal justice system, a burden that it cannot carry. Criminal law and the courts fail to provide for either swiftness or certainty of punishment; police have failed to overcome the basic American distrust of authority to gain the comparable support enjoyed by police in other countries; and the penal system operates under contradictory goals, isolated from public view or support. The final chapter presents a succinct set of proposals for changing the justice system to one that would be humane and more just. Choice This thought-provoking study of the crime problem in America provides an in-depth look at the sociological forces that are dominant in today's society and examines the possible influence of certain contemporary values and perceptions on criminal activity, the quality of justice in the American courts, and the attitude of the general public. The author discusses the various factors that can affect or encourage criminal behavior and relates these directly to the way people feel and respond to the incidence of crime and its punishment, and to a growing lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. Crime in America is first presented in a factual context, followed by a discussion of its cultural influences, and finally with a consideration of its criminal law aspects.
Now in an expanded paperback edition, Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." —Washington Post From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant’s true crime narrative. The paperback edition features a brand-new index as well as an updated introduction and final chapter chronicling the Innocence Project’s continued fight against junk science in courtrooms across America.
