Joining the Dark Side

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Contents

I think we all have a selection of things we are naturally good at. For some, it’s sport; for others, it’s crafts. For me, it was chemistry. And being a brat.

At 16, my report card was well summarised by the words “suffers from misplaced intellectual arrogance.” Even then, I laughed because the teacher had nailed it. How arrogantly misplaced is that? It didn’t get much better at 17 and I almost failed my A-levels, with a style reserved for people who, like me, suffer from this terrible affliction. In the end, I scraped through maths and physics, but thankfully did well in chemistry and got into the University of Hull. I studied there until I was 21 and had no idea what I wanted to do next, except that I didn’t want to work in a chemistry lab…

Finding lead on a pair of jeans is representative of most of the work we do as defence experts. It’s belt-and-braces; the final external quality check. If we agree with Crown’s report, then from our perspective, that’s the end of it…

The most pervasive and destructive form of cognitive bias exists at an institutional level. Many readers will be familiar with recent examples of entrenched racism and sexism, particularly in government organisations, where problems were driven not by individual bias but by systemic problems which resist easy resolution…

There are people who deliberately distort the criminal justice system. We’ve seen cases like the one where a police officer claimed to have been attacked from behind by a knife, though it was obvious his jacket had been cut with a pair of scissors. A Forensic Science Service (FSS) scientist once joked with me that they knew when the police had egged the evidence, as they would get a request to look for ‘traces of glass’ and find a handful of the stuff in the pocket of the garment. Staffordshire and Cleveland Police had to review 355 cases over a 15-year period when they found out one of their officers had lied about his qualifications and given evidence outside his area of expertise…

You might be familiar with the IED, or improvised explosive device, but there is also the IID: the improvised incendiary device. These devices, which range from the basic to the sophisticated, are used to start fires in various ways. In the 1990s, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) was doing exactly that…

I am a firm believer in the connectivity of things. Not in an ‘Internet of Things’ way, but in how life and all its actions and accessories are somehow connected via multiple different paths. Some of these connective paths are chains, which makes them easier to understand, but some are huge, undulating grids with spurs and intersecting chains from other sources which are so complex that deciphering the connections becomes humanly impossible…

It’s funny how things in life work out. When I first moved to the US, I spent considerable effort trying to get a job in either fire investigation or at a crime lab (at which time there were two: Boston City and the Massachusetts State Police)…

So far, we’ve been talking about issues in forensics and the nuts-and-bolts of the job, but there is also an emotional aspect to it.

Most of us see very few dead people in our lives, and the ones we do see tend to be either casualties in accidents or someone who died of natural causes, such as an elderly parent. In this job, depending on whether you go to crime scenes or not, you can end up encountering many dead bodies…

I’d like to think I’m sufficiently capable of denial and dissociation in this line at work, but I, like so many of us, have limits. My wife can tell when something particularly bad has happened just by my face when I walk through the door. What’s worse is that I can’t talk to her about it, partly because she doesn’t need to know the trauma I’ve had to deal with, but also because there are issues of both legal privacy and respect for the dead I must uphold…

Bunny suits are the white disposable overalls you often see on crime scenes news. One of the better ones is Tyvek^® by Dupont, but there are others ranging from economy to high-end. (This said, you don’t really see them being worn on shows like CSI: Miami where, I suspect, editorial preference dictates that audiences would rather see characters’ faces, makeup, coiffed hair, and nice clothing than a giant white penguin whose voice is muffled by a mask)…

June 2005, around nine months after the hurricane

I was sitting next to some guy in Miami airport, a place famous for its long meandering walks and food that can choke a donkey. I don’t know how we got onto the topic, but I mentioned the Cayman Islands and he said, “Didn’t you guys have a hurricane recently?”…

In England and Wales, the civil rules of disclosure are well-documented and stringently followed. They are just as clear on criminal matters: specifically, the Crown must serve any material it feels might benefit the defence or undermine their case, and list all material that has been looked at (even if not used at the time it was listed) as ‘unused material’. Following these steps, however, is a different matter…

From 1998 to 2006, the years I spent in the Cayman Islands, I was predominantly working on the side of the prosecution, but Cayman embraces change well. It was here that I first came across the true neutral role of an expert: as a servant of the court, regardless of whom you are instructed by…

There is a tendency for humans to think that something can be done as long as we can imagine it. This is not true. The laws of physics dictate what we can or can’t do. Much as we have made certain inroads into understanding the physical limitations of our universe, just because we still don’t fully comprehend certain things doesn’t mean they are possible…

The following section is included:

• Index