It is possible that other people have already been through there and touched things, and those people must be eliminated as suspects. Avoiding further contamination, however, is vital to ensuring that the crime has the highest chance of being solved. In addition to wearing gloves, collecting evidence at a crime scene also involves making sure that the evidence, once collected, remains free from any contamination (Penrod, 2003). There are

However, as criminals become more aware of undercover tactics, the covert officer is required to provide more and more proof that he is indeed a criminal- which leads to the officer committing acts that compromise his or her integrity for the sake of maintaining cover. By understanding the often conflicting nature of these goals, deception and integrity, we can see how an undercover officer can become confused, lost, and

, 2005) In the same way that traditional techniques of criminal identification have enabled law enforcement authorities to establish national fingerprint information databases for the purposes of connecting evidence to possible previous offenders, DNA-based forensic evidence has allowed the creation of similar databases greatly expanding the types of forensic evidence used to increase the security of sensitive facilities and restricted areas. When combined with the ever-increasing power of modern computer technology to

At the time that Byrd was tried in 1985 DNA technology was not capable of forensic analysis of biological evidence however; in 1997 a comparison was conducted of Byrd's DNA with the bodily fluid in the rape kit that had been collected at the time of the incident resulting in Byrd's exoneration for this crime. The importance of proper preservation of biological evidence is highlighted in this case and

S., and convictions in many of those cases were based, at least partially, on this particular type of evidence used to connect suspects to bullet fragments associated with the crimes for which they were prosecuted. In some cases, such as that of Lee Wayne Hunt, imprisoned for 21 years for murder in North Carolina, conviction was based exclusively on this type of forensic evidence (Solomon, 2007) on the basis of

Forensic Science: Its Relevance Within the Criminal Justice System Forensic science has, since its inception, had an impact on a number of fields, including education, health, law enforcement (the criminal justice system), to name but a few. Of these, the criminal justice system can be rightly considered the greatest beneficiary of forensic science (Fantino, 2007). Thanks to technological advancement and increased public awareness, all aspects of the justice system today including