Presentation of Evidence in Court

At court, be smartly dressed and be punctual. Adopt a good posture in the witness box. In giving the answers to the questions, be precise and accurate, without being technical. If the answer is not known, this should be stated. If there are attempts by the legal practitioners to mislead, confuse or misstate your evidence, remember that the judge is there to correct these misconceptions. With diligent application in the laboratory and in the courtroom, the materials will have been correctly analysed and the findings successfully reported. 

There is now a considerable body of evidence that the problem of drug use is increasing. Attempts to control drug use and abuse are made at the international level through United Nations legislative documents, which are mirrored in signatory states by legislation at the national and sub-national levels. 

In the UK, the principle legislative documents are the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1971, plus its amendment orders, and the Misuse of Drugs (Regulations), 2001. In the United States, drugs are controlled at the Federal level by the Controlled Substances Act. Control also exists at the State and County levels. An analogous 

Findings should always be reported in a clear and concise manner, which can be understood by the layman. This is particularly important when oral evidence is presented in court, although the same principles also apply to written evidence. Technical evidence should sometimes be included, but not at the expense of clarity. 

Drugscope, Annual Report on the UK Drug Situation, drugreport.asp]. f 

---

Forensic analysis is usually required for the collection of data in the course of determining whether legislation has been infringed. The customer requires that, above all, there is an unbroken chain of evidence from the time the samples were taken to the presentation of evidence in courts of law. In the laboratory this will include documentation and authorization for sample receipt, sample transfer, sub-sampling, laboratory notebooks, analytical procedures, calculations and observations, witness statements and sample disposal. All of these aspects can be called as evidence in court. 

Substantially improve the overall system for firearm and explosive residue detection from the initial arrest of the suspect to the presentation of evidence in court. 

TLC is also one of the analytical techniques that is commonly used to support evidence in courts of law. The chemistry concept for visualization is not unique since this reaction scheme, converting explosive to pink dyes, is decades old. TLC provide rapid screening capability for the presence of a broad range of explosive residues. TLC also provides a means for obtaining specificity, i.e., identifying numerous types of explosives, their concentrations, and also provides the capability to ratio the amounts of the explosives present. For example, Comp B has a mixture of RDX and TNT in its formulation, and if present in the sample the ratio would be 60 40, respectively. This ratio becomes visually apparent by the density of the spots with TLC technology (See Figure 2). 

The sequence of events associated with FDR examination is usually as follows the initial incident, apprehension of suspects, transporting of suspects to police station, sampling of suspects at police station (swabs of hands, face, head hair, and seizure of clothing), submission of items to the laboratory, sampling of clothing at the laboratory, sample preparation, analysis of samples, interpretation of results, preparation of statement of witness report, and the presentation of forensic evidence in court. 

The American trials in Dachau and the similar trials conducted by the other Allies allegedly proved the atrocities committed in the concentration camps and in eastern Europe. The SS and Waf-fen-SS have been deemed criminal organizations ever since, even if for example the German courts do not treat their members as criminals, but this may be only due to the necessity to avoid illegal retroactive application of new laws. The IMT itself reinforced this assessment through the repeated presentation of evidence largely obtained in the aforementioned trials. 

The law assumes that everyone has a free will, and is responsible for his actions. Yet, lawyers regularly present evidence that biological factors led their clients to criminal actions. More and more they use PET scans of drug addicts as evidence in court. It is a rule-of-thumb that whenever a new physical or chemical measurement of the human brain is developed, defense attorneys will try to use the findings in their clients to deny that they have free will. 

It was critical for the success of the SMS audit that the process not just identify the critical issues that led up to the accident but also document them in a thorough fashion that could be presented as evidence in a very high-profile investigation and in court. To do this, an SMS review tool was created. The tool was based on a review of international best practices in SMS application and sourced from numerous programs such as... 

In a much earlier judicial decision related to the scientific reliability of lie detection tests, the so-called Frye rule had emerged. The rule emphasized the need for scientific evidence to have general acceptance before it could be presented to a jury it held sway in courts until the Daubert decision (and is still considered appropriate in some jurisdictions). 

The conclusion is that a positive Griess test on hands cannot constitute evidence of the hands having had contact with explosives. The Griess test should be a presumptive test, to be used only as a preHminary tool for the investigation. Its results should be confirmed in the laboratory before being presented in court. 

In dissenting opinions Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan argued that the majority had too quickly and easily dismissed the Fourth Amendment s requirement that there be probable cause before conducting a search. The Court s liberals were joined in dissent by conservative justice Antonin Scalia, who noted that the Customs Service had never presented actual evidence of actual or likely harm arising from failing to conduct the tests. 

The use of activation analysis in criminal investigations (forensic activation analysis) is also well established. The basic idea here is to match the trace-element distributions found in bullets, paint, oil, and so on found at the scene of a crime with the trace-element distributions in objects found with criminal suspects. Such identification is rapid and nondestructive (allowing the actual evidence to be presented in court). Moreover, the probability of its correctness can be ascertained quantitatively. Other prominent examples of the use of forensic activation analysis involve confirmation of the notion that Napoleon was poisoned (by finding significant amounts of arsenic in hair from his head) and the finding that the activation analysis of the wipe samples taken from a suspect s hand can reveal not only if he or she has fired a gun recently but also the type of gun and ammunition used. 

In criminal proceedings caused by crimes that are considered by the German authorities to have caused major violations of law and order, the trial is held immediately on the District Court level, i.e., on what normally is supposed to be the appeal level (the first level is the County Court). In such cases, the accused has only one trial during which evidence can be presented, that is, there is no appeal possible to the verdict of this court Only a so-called application for a revision of the verdict with the German Federal Supreme Court is possible, but such an application can only criticize errors of form (matters of law). The factual assertions of the deciding court, i.e., description and evaluation of evidence (matters of fact), will not be discussed anymore. Furthermore, it is usually the case that applications for a revision will be denied by the German Federal Supreme Court, if the defense is the only party to request it. 

Remer attached a comprehensive five-page article on the October 1992 trial, in which Remer himself had been sentenced to a 22 months prison term for denying the Holocaust and other things. This article was written by a close friend of Remer who had attended Remer s trial. It basically summarizes the major events of this trials, like a description of various pieces of evidence presented by the two defense lawyers, their rejection by the court, and the final pleadings of the public prosecutor and Remer s defence attorneys. The Rudolf Report had... 

Expressions of skepticism toward an invention by those of skill in the art can be used as secondary evidence of nonobviousness.91 However, evidence of skepticism in the form of an article presented by the inventor s representatives was deemed by the Court to be not relevant. Despite the fact that the presented article was pessimistic about the possibility that an optically pure tricyclic fluoroquinolone antibacterial would obtain certain desired properties, the Court found that it could not have discouraged an inventor at the time of levofloxacin s invention since the article was published 4 years after the date of the invention. As a result, the article could not accurately reflect or influence the state of mind of one of ordinary skill at the time of the invention and thus skepticism of those of skill in the art was not established. 

---