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delegated to different people in different parts of the criminal justice system. Procedures

that in reality could take days, weeks, months, or years appear on these shows to take mere

minutes. This false image is significantly responsible for the public’s high interest in and

expectations for DNA evidence.

The dramatization of forensic science on television has led the public to believe that every

crime scene will yield forensic evidence, and it produces unrealistic expectations that a

prosecutor’s case should always be bolstered and supported by forensic evidence. This

phenomenon is known as the “CSI effect.” Some jurists have come to believe that this

phenomenon ultimately detracts from the search for truth and justice in the courtroom.

History and Development of Forensic Science

Forensic science owes its origins, first, to the individuals who developed the principles and

techniques needed to identify or compare physical evidence and, second, to those who

recognized the need to merge these principles into a coherent discipline that could be

practically applied to a criminal justice system.

The roots of forensic science reach back many centuries, and history records a number of

instances in which individuals closely observed evidence and applied basic scientific

principles to solve crimes. Not until relatively recently, however, did forensic science take

on the more careful and systematic approach that characterizes the modern discipline.

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS

One of the earliest records of applying forensics to solve criminal cases comes from third-

century China. A manuscript titled Yi Yu Ji (“A Collection of Criminal Cases”) reports how a

coroner solved a case in which a woman was suspected of murdering her husband and

burning the body, claiming that he died in an accidental fire. Noticing that the husband’s

corpse had no ashes in its mouth, the coroner performed an experiment to test the woman’s

story. He burned two pigs—one alive and one dead—and then checked for ashes inside the

mouth of each. He found ashes in the mouth of the pig that was alive before it was burned,

but none in the mouth of the pig that was dead beforehand. The coroner thus concluded

that the husband, too, was dead before his body was burned. Confronted with this evidence,

the woman admitted her guilt. The Chinese were also among the first to recognize the

potential of fingerprints as a means of identification.

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Although cases such as that of the Chinese coroner are noteworthy, this kind of scientific

approach to criminal investigation was for many years the exception rather than the rule.

Limited knowledge of anatomy and pathology hampered the development of forensic

science until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For example, the first

recorded notes about fingerprint characteristics were prepared in 1686 by Marcello

Malpighi, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna in Italy. Malpighi, however,

did not acknowledge the value of fingerprints as a method of identification. The first

scientific paper about the nature of fingerprints did not appear until more than a century

later, but it also did not recognize their potential as a form of identification.

INITIAL SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES

As physicians gained a greater understanding of the workings of the body, the first scientific

treatises on forensic science began to appear, such as the 1798 work “A Treatise on Forensic

Medicine and Public Health” by the French physician

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