Resources

For an unattended death, law enforcement must use a combination of investigative techniques and science to calculate how much time elapsed between the victim taking their last breath and their remains being found.

Forensics is an exciting field no matter the era in which it’s practiced; there’s always a little more than meets the eye. To get a quick look at the history of forensics and the crimes it solved as well as committed, read on.

The massive volume of electronic data produced and stored has created new and exciting career opportunities in emerging fields like cyber security and computer forensics. Electronic Discovery (E-Discovery) is a means of combatting cybercrime, and more specifically a specialization of computer forensics that deals with collecting, producing and recovering Electronically Stored Information (ESI) as part of a lawsuit or ongoing investigation.

Wildlife forensics is not new—California’s Wildlife Forensic Laboratory has been operating since the early 1950s—but it’s still far less well-known than its human-centric counterpart, despite being both scientifically rigorous and undeniably cool.

The field of forensic nursing is still generally new in title, but has been around in some form or another due to the interest of a registered nurse named Virginia Lynch who, as far back as the 1980s, realized that nurses could negatively impact the criminal justice field by unknowingly removing evidence from victims that could be crucial to investigations or trials.

Crime scene investigators and forensic scientists are both concerned with deriving information from evidence in order to discover the truth and determine the appropriate course of action. While complementary, the two roles are distinct. Learn more about the similarities and differences between them.

Whether going out on a date, traveling through a foreign country, or interrogating a suspect in a crime, forensic psychology offers a wealth of tools to help decode people’s nonverbal behavior. These cues include gestures, vocal tones, body positioning, micro-expressions of the face, and a number of often subconscious indicators of people’s internal states.

A criminalist collects, documents, preserves, and examines the physical evidence at a crime scene, which could be something as huge as a bus, or as tiny as a pollen grain; criminologists, on the other hand, study why crimes occur, how they can be prevented, and the effects they have on a society.