Exam 1 Flashcards
Mathieu Orfila
Father of Forensic Toxicology
Perfected testing for arsenic
Calvin Goddard
Comparison microscope and fire arm database — ballistics
Locard
Locard’s Exchange Principle: there is ALWAYS evidence (trace evidence guy)
Alphonse Bertillion
Father of Criminal Identification — Bertillion Measurements (body measurement system that helped connect criminals to other crimes)
Albert S. Osborn
Author of “Questioned Documents”, handwriting analyst during the Lindbergh kidnapping
Karl Landsteiner
Discovered blood types by looking at the surface markers on blood cells and categorizing them
Leone Lattes
Developed a method of identifying and testing dried blood. Also Precipitin test for distinguishing human blood from animal blood
Francis Galton
first study on fingerprints, developed methods of classifying. Findings were used on the first case that fingerprints were used as an identifier (Francisca Rojas case)
Walter C. McCrone
Lead the use of analytical techniques in forensic science, premiere microscopist
Shroud of Turin (proved it wrong)
Hans Gross
Inventor of the Gross Detective System, setting the standard for how crime scenes are handled, ie objective observation —> theories
Bertillion’s Method of Anthropometrics
A way of measuring specific body parts and filing them into a database in order to identify repeat offenders. Only used for a short time — Will West incident ended it when a criminal had an identical twin who had all the same measurements…but not fingerprints
Fingerprint formation
Formed by the dermal papilla under your skin, which is why you cannot remove them. They don’t change with age, either.
Latent fingerprint
Invisible
Made up of mostly water and other substances in the shape of a print
Patent (visible) fingerprints
Made of a substance on the finger, such as paint, blood, ink, etc.
Plastic fingerprints
Left by touching something maleable, such as soap, wax, putty, or dust
The 8 types of ridge patterns
- Plain arch
- Tented arch
- Radial loop
- Ulnar loop
- Plain whorl
- Central pocket whorl
- Double loop (a type of whorl)
- Accidental whorl
Obtuse angle, no deltas
Plain arch
Acute angle, no deltas
Tented arch
Outlet on thumb side, one delta
Radial loop
Outlet on pinky side, one delta
Ulnar loop
Two deltas, no outlet
Plain whorl
One or two deltas, outlet
Central pocket whorl
Two deltas, two loops
Double loop (whorl)
Three deltas
Accidental whorl
Primary Classification System
Edward Henry
Used to quickly eliminate suspects by counting the number of whorl prints on a person’s hands and giving them a score based on that number and which fingers the whorls appear on
Minutiae (my-nu-sha)
The little details. (Bifurcation, spur, bridge, etc). No one is going to have the same minutiae in the same place on the same print as someone else
AFIS
Fingerprint database kept by the FBI
What 6 things can you identify from hair analysis?
- Human or animal
- Ancestry
- Origin (on the body)
- Manner in which hair was removed
- Treated hair (dyed, permed, bleached)
- Drugs ingested (acts like a drug timeline)
Three structures in a hair shaft:
Cuticle, cortex, medulla
Medulla patterns:
Uniserial ••••••••••••
Multiserial :::::::::::::::
Lattice/mosaic
Vacuolated
Medullary index
Comparison of the width of the medulla to the width of the hair shaft
If the width is less than 1/3, it’s human
If the width is more than 1/2, it’s an animal
Stages of hair growth
Anagen — actively growing
Catagen — transitioning to…
Telegen — no longer growing (can easily fall out)
Rosalind Franklin
X-ray crystallographer who took the first picture of DNA
James Watson and Francis Crick
Responsible for the first accurate model of DNA as a double helix
Nucleus
Brain of the cell
Chromosomes
Our bodies’ way of organizing the information that our genetic material contains
Genes
Info blocks inside chromosomes, blueprints for a specific protein
Alleles
Variations of genes (dominant, recessive, co-dominant)
Nucleotide
Smaller subunits of DNA
Nitrogen base/base pair
Part of the DNA structure
Two categories:
- purines
- pyrimidines
The 4 nitrogen bases
Cytosine + Guanine (CG)
Adenine + Thymine (AT)
3 parts of a nucleotide
Sugar + nitrogen base + phosphate group
PCR
How they amplify the sample of DNA so they have more to test
STR
Short Tandem Repeats
- tetranuleotide — AAAG AAAG AAAG
- trinucleotide — CTT CTT CTT
- dinucleotide — AG AG AG
Number of repeats at a specific location (location is the same for every strand being tested, cut at the same place every time)
CODIS
The FBI database of DNA
Locus (plural: loci)
Physical position of an STR and its associated flanking sequence
Homozygous
When the allele is the same (BB, bb)
Heterozygous
When the alleles are different (Bb, bB)
