The Chain of Custody Issues in Forensic Investigation (Essay Sample)

The Chain of Custody Issues in Forensic Investigation
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The Chain of Custody Issues in Forensic Investigation
Introduction
Forensic investigation is the meeting point of logic, science and law. When a body has been washed up a stretch of a beach, a fire has broken out in an apartment or a car accident that has claimed a life of lives. All these are potential crime scenes, and a systematic examination is required to uncover any physical evidence to help in the identification of what happened and the people involved. The process has to be controlled carefully and quite thoroughly to ensure that crucial evidence has been collected, and fragile evidence has not been destroyed in the whole process (Moore, Brookes, & Naylor 2014). Therefore, in the forensic investigation it is important to secure the areas that may be containing evidence to enable excellent collection of physical evidence and preserve package and submit the evidence to the laboratories for analysis. With the critical pieces of evidence, the investigators may be having the ability to reconstruct the elements of the crime. For that reason, there is need to develop accurate measures to ensure the evidence is acceptable in the courts (Perlin, 2010).
Principles of Crime Scene Investigation
The concept known as Locard’s Exchange Principle has been known to be the principle behind any crime investigation in forensic science. The principle states that whenever someone enters or leaves a given environment, something physical can both be added to and removed from the scene. With this, it means that every contact will always leave behind a trace of a forensic investigation CITATION Has12 \l 1033 (Buker, 2012). The logic behind this principle will allow the forensic investigators to link suspects to the victims, to the physical objects present at the scenes. Any of the evidence that can link a given person to the scene of the incident is referred to as associative evidence. Forensic investigators commonly look for fingerprints, weapons, blood or body fluids, hairs, fibers and anything close to that. While the associative evidence is linking people to the place of the crime, reconstructive evidence will allow the investigators to gain an understanding of the events that took place at the scene CITATION Has12 \l 1033 (Buker, 2012).
Improving Chain of Custody in Forensic Investigation
Forensic investigators need to acquire and analyze a large amount of evidence collected from the scenes of crime and submit to the courts the technical reality about facts in virtual worlds. The collected evidence is quite volatile, complex, impulsive, diffuse, and can be improperly modified after being acquired CITATION Don12 \l 1033 (Shelton, 2012). The chain of custody of the evidence must ensure that collected evidence is accepted as being true by the court of law. In this situation, the traditional paper-based chain of custody has been proved to be inefficient and is not able to guarantee that the forensic processes followed for legal and technical principles in the modern society (Zonderman, 2014).
According to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. National Institute of Justice, Crimes Scene Guides, (2011), Computer forensics practitioners use different types of forensic software to obtain copies or images from the digital electronic devices. The associated metadata is then registered, for instance, the serial number of a computers’ hard disk and the practitioners’ name. Usually, the chain of custody software and the data are insufficient to guarantee to the courts that the quality of forensic images are original or even guarantee that only the right personnel had access to the evidence. The Recent developments in forensic investigation software have made it possible to collect evidence in multiple locations and make analysis in a distributed environment CITATION Col13 \l 1033 (Colmez, 2013).
Maintaining the Chain of Custody in Civil Litigation
According to the Members of the Scientific Working Group on Microbial Genetics and Forensics (2010), the Chain of custody is a recognized concept in criminal law, but until recent years it was foreign to many civil litigators. In the criminal law field, police were able to seize the evidence, seal it in a given plastic bag, label it appropriately, and then sign it into a locked and protected evidence room. If the evidence is to be taken out by anyone for any reasons, for instance, laboratory examination or testing, the withdrawal is to be noted on the log. The next removal from the safe room would likely not be until its presentation to the trial in the court of law (Leslie and Miller, 2014).
The Chain of custody testimony would include documentation on how the data was collected, transported, analyzed, sealed and preserved for production. The given information is important to help in the verification of the electronic data since it can be easily distorted if proper precautions are not well taken (Kirk, 2013). It is quite complicated to handle any electronic data as given evidence. But it is much easier to sign in tangible narcotics taken into possession at the time of an arrest and then signing them out at the time of the trial. That is because electronic discovery is a multi-stage process development, and custody is an issue at every one of the presented stages CITATION Rob15 \l 1033 (Weisberg, 2015).
Chain of Custody - Forensic Acquisition
A lot has been written on the chain of custody that shows how rooted the concept is in its account of a criminal evidence requirement. Alexander, Forth & Tunstall (2012) stated that Law enforcers will always continue to infuse and permeate the practice. As a matter of fact, the computer forensic investigators who are working in the civil litigation field all come from law enforcement backgrounds. Therefore, for them to seize and make a forensically exact and precise image of a hard drive in a hostile situation suits them the most. One case study is one that a court orders the seizure along with the inspection of a husband’s private laptop in a contested divorce hearing. The forensic investigators, who may be acting for the wife’s attorney, will arrive at the husband’s residence with a court order, they will proceed to seize the physical laptop, then attach copying equipment to it, and create a bit-by-bit image of the hard drive as a whole (Kirk, 2013).
The action is not about just copying the files, but it is copying the entire hard drive with everything in it. There is the slack space as well as deleted files that may not have been overwritten, for instance, deleted e-mails messages to and from the paramour, any deleted brokerage accounts, and even the banking records. It is conceivable to gain access to the internet surfing history and any other kind of work present on the hard drive. There is the use of different tools such as the Guidance Software’s Encase4 and the Forensic Tool Kit5 (Waldron, Amy & David, 2013). All these devices have been designed so that when copying the data, an activity that in a typical setting would change some of the information. The metadata on the source hard drive ends up altering nothing on the source hard drive. The ribbon in which the stored data passes is a one-way street, and outbound only.
The chain of custody documentation that will be required to this point is rather straight forward. The seizing investigators will first have to take a photograph of the laptop, record its brand and the model number, and get details about the serial number. The date of seizure, and quite importantly, the "hash" value or the "electronic fingerprint" of the intact hard drive is also important components of the investigation CITATION Rod11 \l 1033 (Grabosky, 2011). The next step includes the forensic copying of the electronically stored information to a pristine hard drive. After copying the data to a pristine hard drive, the hash value will be taken to the drive onto which the data is copied. The hash value of the new drive, given that the process was correctly performed, will have to match the hash value of the original hard drive. This will then be presented to the court of law as evidence (Morrison, 2011).
Crime scene and physical evidence awareness
As already seen, any incident, be it a crime, an accident, natural disaster and even the family conflicts will always leave traces of evidence at the scene. It is the main objective to interpret correctly the facts leading to the incidence, reconstruct the events and get a full understanding of what exactly happened (Begault, Heise & Peltier 2014). Owing to the fragile as well as transient nature of the evidence being collected, the reliability and the preservation of such information is very important to any forensic investigation. Evidence integrity can be observed using a set of specific guiding principles. Acting with care and utmost professionalism all though the crime scene investigation process, it is very significant to administer the evidence to the court or designated human right inquiry for humanitarian actions.
Conclusion
When considering all the possible sources of information available for forensic investigation, physical evidence plays a major role in the investigation process. With the omission of physical evidence, all the other sources of information will suffer from problems related to limited reliability (Lindley, 2014). When the Physical evidence is correctly recognized and handled properly, it offers the best prospects for providing an objective and more reliable information about the...