DNA evidence, linking perpetrators to crime scenes, is central to many legal proceedings. However, DNA samples from crime scenes often contain PCR-inhibitory substances, which may generate blank or incomplete DNA profiles. Extensive DNA purification can be required to rid the sample of these inhibitors, although these procedures increase the risk of DNA loss. Most forensic laboratories use comm...

On 08 April 2004, the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Science in the Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, received 14 logs from Larry R. Smart, Criminal Investigation Section, Office of the Sherriff, Collin County, Texas. Ten logs numbered 2600 to 2609 were retrieved from a crime scene. Four logs were retrieved from the scene of a gathering attended by the suspect. These logs are numbered ...

In 2007, the Computer & Digital Forensics (C&DF), Criminal Justice (CJ), and Paralegal programs started to employ a mock trial to bring students from these three disciplines together. The event starts with a pre-planned crime scene. CJ students secure and process the crime scene, interview witnesses, and gather evidence. Digital devices are recovered and are forensically processed by the C&DF s...

the menace of organized crime and terrorist activity grows ever more sophisticated as the ability to enter, control and destroy our electronic and security systems grows at an equivalent rate. cyber-crime (organized criminal acts using microchip and software manipulation) is the world’s biggest growth industry and is now costing an estimated $220 billion loss to organizations and individuals ev...

To determine the circumstances of an incident, investigators need to reconstruct events that occurred in the past. The large amount of data spread across the crime scene makes this task very tedious and complex. In particular, the analysis of the reconstructed timeline, due to the huge quantity of events that occurred on a digital system, is almost impossible and leads to cognitive overload. It...

One of the important evidence in a crime scene that is normally overlooked but very important evidence is shoe print as the criminal is normally unaware of the mask for this. In this paper we use image processing technique to process reference shoe images to make it index-able for a search from the database the shoe print impressions available in the commercial market. This is achieved first by...

Currently, criminal’s profile (CP) is obtained from investigator’s or forensic psychologist’s interpretation, linking crime scene characteristics and an offender’s behavior to his or her characteristics and psychological profile. This paper seeks an efficient and systematic discovery of non-obvious and valuable patterns between variables from a large database of solved cases via a probabilistic...

Body fluid traces recovered at crime scenes are among the most important types of evidence to forensic investigators. They contain valuable DNA evidence which can identify a suspect or victim as well as exonerate an innocent individual. The first step of identifying a particular body fluid is highly important since the nature of the fluid is itself very informative to the investigation, and the...

RAM content acquisition is an important step in live forensic analysis of computer systems. FireWire offers an attractive way to acquire RAM content of Apple Mac computers equipped with a FireWire connection. However, the existing techniques for doing so require substantial knowledge of the target computer configuration and cannot be used reliably on a previously unknown computer in a crime sce...