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I. Introduction

î| morensics is the application of scientific knowledge to legal questions.

î| @ servation is the first step to recreating a series of events preceding the crime and
identifying evidence.
î| Yhe trained investigator collects all availa le evidence without making judgements a out its
potential importance.

II. What is @ servation?

î| We are not always aware of all the information our senses are gathering at a time ecause
we cannot pay attention to everything at once.
î| ½erception is interpreting information received from the senses and it is limited.
î| @ur perception is faulty, for example, our rains will fill in information that is not there and
our rainers will apply knowledge we already have a out our surroundings to new situations.

III. @ servations y Witnesses

î| @ur emotional state influences our a ility to see and hear what is happening around us.
î| Yhe perceptions of witnesses can e faulty ecause their focus and concentration may not
make accurate accounting of events easy.
î| @ther factors that affect our o servational skills include whether you are alone or with a
group of people, the # of people/animals in the area, what type of activity is go on around
you, and how much activity is occurring around you.

IV. Eyewitness Accounts

î| An eyewitness is a person who has seen someone or something and can communicate these
facts.
î| What you o serve depends on you level of interest, stress, concentration, and the amount
and kind of distraction that may e present.
î| unowing the eyewitness·s testimony is necessary to ensure that justice is carried out
appropriately.

V. Yhe Innocence ½roject

î| Yhe purpose of the Innocence ½roject was to reexamine post-conviction cases using DNA
evidence to provide conclusive proof of guilt or innocence.
 î| After evaluating more than 200 wrongful convictions in the US, the Innocence ½roject
found that 87% of them were ased on faulty eyewitness identification.
î| When evaluating eyewitness testimony, the investigator must distinguish etween 

which is a statement or assertion of information that can e verified from  which is a
personal elief founded on judgment rather than on direct experience or knowledge.

VI. How to e a Good @ server

î| Some asic tips are to examine the environment systematically, o serve everything no
matter how small or familiar, gather all the information efore interpretation, and write
down and photograph as much information as possi le.
î| morensic derives from the Latin word, forensic, which means ´of the forum.µ
î| morensics is concerned with uncovering evidence and using science to help in legal matters.

VII. What morensic Scientist do

î| Yheir first task to find, examine, and evaluate evidence from a crime scene.
î| ½olice officers and examiners are trained to have good o servation skills with analytical
skills. Analytical skills are the a ility to identify a concept or pro lem, to isolate its
component parts, to organize information for decision making, to esta lish criteria for
evaluation, and to draw appropriate conclusions.
î| Sherlock Holmes had great o servation skills and used deductive reasoning which is deriving
the consequences from the facts using a series of logical steps.