All partners in the criminal justice system need to reach a shared level of understanding with regard to the role of forensic science, director of the Forensic Science Laboratory Sheila Willis said in a Science Week lecture yesterday.
A clear appreciation of the potential and limitations of forensic science is made more difficult by the recent proliferation of television programmes like CSIand Law and Order, Dr Willis said.
The programmes lead us to mistakenly believe only one forensic investigator handles evidence on a given case, and that he or she always comes to a conclusive determination which will make or break a case by the time the episode ends.
Such representations tend to foster a presumption that "the answers we supply are black and white, but of course there's a grey area", she said.
In reality, Dr Willis noted, "we don't fit it in [ in] 47 minutes, and the roles are not all rolled into one". There are a number of separate functions among forensic scientists, she added. Some specialise in chemistry, biology, DNA, drugs or pattern evidence.
In some instances, the scientist's task is to simply identify a particular substance, while in other cases he or she is meant to establish a link between a person, place and/or a substance.
In Ireland, Dr Willis noted, the lack of a DNA database "means we're not getting the maximum value from science in this country". The public has some concerns for privacy about such an information source, but "that's partly to do with a misunderstanding of what's used in DNA databases", she said.