Roles Of Forensic Science In Criminal Justice

Crime has been committed over many centuries where every country has experienced some form of crime. Crime affects a whole country and all the people within it where it is the States responsibility to arrest, charge, prosecute and punish the offender. The criminal justice is put in place for this reason where it views crime as a violation of the law of the land (state) in which offenders must be punished. Questions such as " What law was broken?" "Who did it?" And "What punishment do they deserve" are asked surrounding a criminal case, where both legal and scientific professionals are assigned different roles within the system. The main objectives are based on finding, identifying, arresting, charging, prosecuting and punishing the offender.

The work of forensic science is used to not only help with analyzing evidence for prosecution but criminal investigation and identification. Forensic science is defined as " a partnership between science and law where it consists of the application of science to the civil and criminal laws, that are enforced by police agencies in a criminal justice system". The main function of forensic science is to provide impartial interpretations of scientific evidence for use by non- scientific people in the court of law. The responsibility of the Crime Scene Investigator (CSI) is to locate, collect, document, preserve and submit evidence gathered for forensic analysis and examination. The evidence goes from the crime scene to a courtroom where after the evidence is collected, it is analysed by a forensic lab then the results are presented in court. One single hair strand, fingerprint or blood stain found by a CSI can allow a crime to be reconstructed, lead the police to the offender and allow the courts to convict the

Firstly, Forensic Science is important to a crime scene investigation where it makes it possible to identify a person who committed a crime or persons who was a victim of a crime through Forensic Fingerprint Analysis. A crime scene investigator spends most of their time doing field work where they are often the second professionals at a crime scene where police officers are usually the first persons to arrive or first responders ("Crime-Scene Investigation and Evidence Collection," n.d.). The police officers have the responsibility to protect the crime scene until the CSI arrives to collect evidence. The CSI examines the location and gathers relevant evidence where during the investigation evidence such as fingerprints can be collected from the crime scene. Physical evidence plays a crucial role in crime scene investigations and the identification of the suspect involved in the crime. Solving the crime itself depends greatly on the gathering of the physical evidence in the process of investigation. Physical evidence is defined as " any or all objects that can establish a crime has been committed