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Purpose: The authors attempt to capture new forensic science students’ pre-conceptions of the field and their assessment of competencies. Methodology: The authors surveyed students at a Historically Black College and University and a Primarily White Institution on their viewership of crime and forensic TV shows and measured their competencies in a range of forensic science skills at the start and end of the semester, along with having students capture errors and evidence from an episode of CSI Las Vegas. Findings: Students who were viewers of crime series with and without prior forensics coursework over evaluated their level of preparedness at the start of the semester, often ranking themselves as moderately or well prepared in blood spatter analysis, fingerprinting, bodily fluid, and hair/fiber collection. Research limitations: The authors relied on a convenience sample of forensic science courses, and their comparison of student learning was disrupted by COVID-19. Originality: The authors examine student concerns with working at crime scenes and reflections on their abilities to succeed in the field. The authors discuss the need for incorporating media literacy, content warnings, and emotional socialization and professional development into forensic science curricula to better equip and prepare students for careers as crime scene investigators and forensic analysts.

The popularity of television shows such as CSI:(insert appropriate city here) makes everyone think they are somehow a forensic expert. The portrayal of this kind of subject on radio is of course much more complicated as each observer has an image in their own head rather than in front of their eyes. This chapter seeks to inform The Archers listeners and other interested parties about the Blossom Hill Cottage crime scene examination — what they might expect to have seen from an evidential perspective and how the findings may inform the court as to what really occurred that fateful night. The chapter presents general information about different blood patterns that may be observed at crime scenes such as this and others, what they may (or may not) mean and a discussion about the strengths and limitations of this kind of scientific examination and interpretation. Whilst this can clearly be a serious subject, the intention is to inform and (probably) bust some televisual myths with a light-hearted edge from an Archers fan and fellow Tweetalonger, additionally considering online speculation about other potential evidence.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore homicide trends in Trinidad and Tobago, to describe the factors that impact the risk for homicide perpetration and victimization, and to discuss the effectiveness of strategies implemented by law enforcement agencies to prosecute homicide cases.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter employs a detailed review of relevant literature to explore homicide trends and the strategies instituted to investigate and prosecute this criminal offense.

Findings – Our findings suggest that homicide victimization and perpetration is concentrated among young men of African descent, who reside in underprivileged communities with a high population density. Gang violence prompted by a narco-drug economy, coupled with gun violence, accentuates the risk of homicide perpetration and victimization. As homicide rates remained high, law enforcement officials in Trinidad and Tobago were ill equipped to investigate and make arrests in these offenses.

Originality/value – This chapter adds to the literature on homicide in Trinidad and Tobago by (1) showing that geographic and demographic factors structure homicide victimization and (2) exploring how the political economy of drugs in the Caribbean contributes to murder.

Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to assess the state of evidence examining and explaining trends and patterns in homicide clearances.

Design/methodology/approach – After reviewing the varying bodies of literature on homicide investigations and clearances, the author assesses the degree of support for the prevailing explanations of why some homicides are more likely to be solved than others. The author also use national data to evaluate several reasons for declining clearances.

Findings – Changes in the nature of homicide and deteriorating police–community relations are likely major contributors to declining clearance rates. The most consistent findings regarding patterns are the greater likelihood of clearance in homicides involving young children, contact weapons, residential locations, and killings not occurring in the course of another crime. Explanations relying on notions of victim devaluing generate the least support. There is considerable support for the legal factors approach and community-level explanations show promise. The findings regarding the role of forensic evidence are mixed. Smaller scale studies are beginning to help identify best practices for homicide investigations.

Originality/value – This chapter assesses several explanations for declining clearance rates and brings together divergent streams of research to summarize the current state of knowledge on homicide clearances, best practices in homicide investigations, and gaps to be filled by further studies.

Textuality within the Western tradition has functioned in Derrida's analysis as the essential, yet disavowed supplement of a logos that perpetually sets itself against the necessary interventions of writing. Derrida compares textuality to a pharmakon, an ambivalent substance that has the capacity to act as both poison and cure. The ‘cure’ that textuality offers to the law pertains to the law's inability to establish its own permanence, or presence, without some literary intervention: only once it is ‘put into writing’ does the law remain ‘on record’, its permanence ‘ensured [by the text] with the vigilance of a guardian’ (Derrida, 2000b, p. 113). At the same time, however, textuality could be said to commit a kind of crime against the logos: it improperly appropriates the ‘presence’ of the law, steals it and substitutes itself for it. Writing is, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, ‘the enemy of all relationships of presence, of all legality’ (Blanchot, 1987, p. 156). The law's ‘presence’ nevertheless depends upon this criminal narrativity. In particular, the emergence of law requires the emergence of a narrative capable of resolving the trauma that attends the inception of communal and individual subjectivity: the law acquires its ‘presence’ only after a certain violent communal fantasy has established a vital untruth about the law's origins. The founding moment of Western law is a representation of a fictive transgression that serves to account for the terrifying, symbolically unrepresentable rupture that separates the individual and the community from the pre-symbolic void. In order for the law to take its place, it is necessary to stage a ‘crime’ and then to re-present it as the law's sure foundation. This crime is parricide and Derrida links it explicitly to the advent of narrativity as the law's uncanny, necessary condition of being:[…] this quasi-event bears the marks of fictive narrativity (fiction of narration as well as fiction as narration: fictive narration as the simulacrum of narration and not only as the narration of an imaginary history). It is the origin of literature as well as the origin of law – like the dead father, a story told, a spreading rumour, without author or end, but an ineluctable and unforgettable story. (Derrida, 1992, p. 199)

Purpose: This chapter explores the current hybridization between true crime and nonfiction investigative documentaries on Video on Demand (VOD) platforms. It would seem necessary to distinguish true crime productions from long-form journalistic documentaries in order to avoid confusion between different products that do not pursue the same ends, such as audiovisual products with highly emotive and engaging components versus a journalistic approach to the truth about what happened. Methodology/approach: The analysis is based on the specific theory of true crime developed by Punnett, who provides genuine narrative codes (Justice, Subversive, Geographic, Forensic, Vocative, and Folkloric) for true crime to distinguish it from the formal conventions and social objectives of journalistic documentaries. The case study (El crimen de Alcàsser) was selected because of its potential to drive a detailed and in-depth study on one of the most traumatic crimes in the country’s recent history: the kidnapping, rape, torture, and killing of three teenagers in 1992. Findings: Several scholars have identified journalistic elements in true crime productions in the digital context, adopted in an attempt to distance them from the true crime tradition of appealing to primitive instincts. Although it has been perceived also as a renewed formula for journalism to reach a wide audience and mainstream success, it banishes journalism from its origin and goals: to guarantee the citizenship’s right to be truly informed about crime. In this way, journalistic documentaries inspired by real crimes may play a crucial role in a democratic society, while true crime only exploits the empathy of viewers and places them in the active participation of determining the suspect-protagonist’s guilt as a mode of “clickable” entertainment in the digital culture. Research limitations: This is the first in a series of studies within a broader research project on true crime documentaries released on the VOD platforms in Spain. The findings are, in this case, preliminary. The analysis needs additional testing before its utility can be reasonably determined and a theory about true crime made in Spain could be developed. Originality: First, there is no specific research in the field of true crime in Spain, although crime stories already enjoyed a prominent place in Spain’s conventional TV programming. Second, the Punnett analysis model introduces an interesting way to complement existing theoretical references about the connections between true crime and journalism.

This chapter examines whether the view of the jury in cases involving forensic evidence can be changed from that of “naïve automatons” to that of “sophisticated decision makers”; whether the defense and prosecution must provide the jurors with information to help them develop a schema upon which to evaluate the forensic evidence; and whether to remove decision making from the expert forensic scientist and return it to the jury. The chapter uses secondary sources of information collected from criminal cases, the current federal law, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with expert testimony, studies of how to enable juries confronted with forensic evidence, as well as a framework of learning theory and persuasion games. I argue that expert forensic scientists make errors. Juries are capable of making decisions based on complex forensic evidence if provided the knowledge within which to develop schema to evaluate that evidence. Competition between the defense and prosecution in presenting interpretations of scientifically valid evidence, as well as providing schema to enable the jury to evaluate the information, provides juries with the ability to arrive at a full information decision. Expert nullification of jury decision making should be halted and decision making returned to the jury. The value of this chapter is to integrate learning theory from cognitive psychology with one-shot and extended persuasion games to evaluate the roles of the jury and the expert forensic scientists within the criminal justice system.