Forensics Exhibit
February 28, 2006
Solving Puzzles With Body Parts as the Pieces
By AMANDA SCHAFFER
BETHESDA, Md. — A white sheet shrouds an autopsy table, one of the first things you see as you enter the exhibit. Around the corner lie a heart preserved in formaldehyde with a small bullet hole through its center, a kidney sliced open to reveal a knife wound and a stomach whose rippled edges attest to arsenic poisoning.
Further on, past color lithographs and early treatises on medical forensics, come specimens of the black blowfly, which lays eggs on fresh cadavers, producing early-stage maggots.
These are some of the displays in "Visible Proofs," a new exhibit that details the rise of forensic science as an authoritative field, with specialized tools for pinpointing whodunit (and when and how). Situated at the National Library of Medicine, on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., the show opened on Feb. 16 and will run for two years.
The materials on view are largely "about the struggle to see into the body and make the body visible," said Michael Sappol, a historian at the library, the curator of the show and the author of "A Traffic of Dead Bodies," about anatomy in 19th-century America. Not only did early forensic scientists need to cull and interpret physical evidence of a crime, they also needed to establish themselves and their work as authoritative, worthy of public respect and attention in a court of law.
This was one reason they strove to make their findings as easy to see as possible, said Dr. Sappol. Thus came the specialized camera-microscopes designed to photograph tiny fibers of hair and samples of blood; a test for arsenic that yielded a simple, visible result (a silvery substrate on a glass tube); fingerprint analysis; and even crime scene photography: all of these served both as crucial investigative tools and as props for dramatizing a case to a jury.
"There was a lot of theater involved," Dr. Sappol said. "The scientist was making himself visible, as well as the evidence."
"Visible Proofs" features a number of infamous murder mysteries, including the "Jigsaw Puzzle Murders," which took place in Britain in 1935.
In that case, mutilated body parts were found scattered under a bridge near the English-Scottish border. A team of forensic scientists was recruited to reassemble the bodies and figure out what had occurred.
By taking photographs of the remains and superimposing these over images of two missing women, the scientists were able to identify the body parts as those belonging to a local woman named Isabella Ruxton and her maid, Mary Rogerson.
Additional study of entomological evidence like maggots (used to determine the time of death), fingerprints, blood stains and other clues pinned the crimes to Isabella's husband, Buck Ruxton, a physician.
Dr. Ruxton was convicted of murder, largely on the basis of forensic evidence, and sentenced to death. He confessed to the murders shortly before he was hanged.
The Ruxton case was "one of several mid-20th-century cases that really consolidated the authority of forensic medicine," Dr. Sappol said.
"Visible Proofs" also showcases a series of crime scenes reconstructed in miniature in the 1940's and 1950's by Frances Glessner Lee. Mrs. Lee, who was an heir to the International Harvester fortune, was a devotee of forensic science and, in 1943, became the first woman named as an honorary police captain in New Hampshire.
Her dollhouse-size dioramas, called the "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," provide painstaking views of the victim and his or her surroundings: from the glimmering knife left atop a pile of linens in one diorama to the pink bathroom door left ajar in another.
The visual clues on display are sufficient to figure out precisely what happened and how, Dr. Sappol said. Indeed, the dioramas, which Mrs. Lee developed as teaching tools, are still used to test forensics students in Baltimore. (And so, the National Library of Medicine does not disclose answers to the puzzles.)
Of course, the opportunity to see into a crime — and into the body — increased enormously with the advent of DNA testing, the trump card of much forensic science.
"Visible Proofs" highlights, among other stories, the case of Kirk Bloodsworth, a former commercial fisherman from Maryland who was the first person on death row to be exonerated by DNA evidence. In 1985, Mr. Bloodsworth was convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl, based largely on the testimony of five witnesses who said they had seen him with the victim.
"When I was sentenced to death, the courtroom erupted into applause," Mr. Bloodsworth, now 45, said in an interview. "I was hated." Yet Mr. Bloodsworth did not commit these crimes. In 1992, DNA testing demonstrated that sperm isolated from the victim's underwear could not have come from Mr. Bloodsworth, given signature differences between his DNA and that found in the sample.
Mr. Bloodsworth was freed in 1993.
His case was among the first worked on by the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 by the lawyers Peter J. Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck.
Post-conviction DNA testing has now exonerated at least 170 people, according to the Innocence Project. "Visible Proofs" appears at a moment when forensic findings wield enormous influence in the courtroom and in public imagination. Films and television shows like the hit series "C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation" have glamorized the image of the field as well.
On them, investigators routinely reach definitive conclusions by running chemical tests on carpet fibers and clothing samples and performing copious (and rapid) DNA analyses.
Forensic science "has taken on the kind of authority we once gave to priests and prophets," said Ronald Thomas, president of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., and author of "Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science." "In a world of great uncertainty, the public is looking for an assurance that we can penetrate the mystery and find the truth." Science is not always able to do so, he added.
"There is a growing accumulation of knowledge, which leads to the possibility of more just results," Dr. Sappol said. "But it is not a sure shot."
The National Library of Medicine exhibit does not highlight cases in which DNA tests and other forensic results have proved susceptible to error or bias. But a number of such cases have come to light in recent years in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere.
In 2003, William C. Thompson, a professor in the department of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, helped demonstrate that DNA testing by the Houston police crime lab led to the wrongful rape conviction of a man named Josiah Sutton in 1999. When the error was uncovered and further testing performed, Mr. Sutton was exonerated.
Forensic scientists often work closely with law enforcement officials and, "without even realizing it, they can adopt the law enforcement perspective and begin interpreting evidence in a manner slanted in favor of the prosecution's case," Dr. Thompson said.
Forensic analysts may also be captive to their field's exalted status and thus have difficulty admitting mistakes or explaining inconclusive test results.
"They're under a lot of pressure to fix things," Dr. Thompson said. "If you look closely at what's going on in fraud cases, often analysts are not trying to frame people, but they're covering up control failures or errors in the experimental process."
"The irony is that just as forensics experts are riding a wave of credibility inspired by shows like 'C.S.I.,' " he continued, "a surprising number of DNA analysts have been caught faking data."
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
Solving Puzzles With Body Parts as the Pieces
By AMANDA SCHAFFER
BETHESDA, Md. — A white sheet shrouds an autopsy table, one of the first things you see as you enter the exhibit. Around the corner lie a heart preserved in formaldehyde with a small bullet hole through its center, a kidney sliced open to reveal a knife wound and a stomach whose rippled edges attest to arsenic poisoning.
Further on, past color lithographs and early treatises on medical forensics, come specimens of the black blowfly, which lays eggs on fresh cadavers, producing early-stage maggots.
These are some of the displays in "Visible Proofs," a new exhibit that details the rise of forensic science as an authoritative field, with specialized tools for pinpointing whodunit (and when and how). Situated at the National Library of Medicine, on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., the show opened on Feb. 16 and will run for two years.
The materials on view are largely "about the struggle to see into the body and make the body visible," said Michael Sappol, a historian at the library, the curator of the show and the author of "A Traffic of Dead Bodies," about anatomy in 19th-century America. Not only did early forensic scientists need to cull and interpret physical evidence of a crime, they also needed to establish themselves and their work as authoritative, worthy of public respect and attention in a court of law.
This was one reason they strove to make their findings as easy to see as possible, said Dr. Sappol. Thus came the specialized camera-microscopes designed to photograph tiny fibers of hair and samples of blood; a test for arsenic that yielded a simple, visible result (a silvery substrate on a glass tube); fingerprint analysis; and even crime scene photography: all of these served both as crucial investigative tools and as props for dramatizing a case to a jury.
"There was a lot of theater involved," Dr. Sappol said. "The scientist was making himself visible, as well as the evidence."
"Visible Proofs" features a number of infamous murder mysteries, including the "Jigsaw Puzzle Murders," which took place in Britain in 1935.
In that case, mutilated body parts were found scattered under a bridge near the English-Scottish border. A team of forensic scientists was recruited to reassemble the bodies and figure out what had occurred.
By taking photographs of the remains and superimposing these over images of two missing women, the scientists were able to identify the body parts as those belonging to a local woman named Isabella Ruxton and her maid, Mary Rogerson.
Additional study of entomological evidence like maggots (used to determine the time of death), fingerprints, blood stains and other clues pinned the crimes to Isabella's husband, Buck Ruxton, a physician.
Dr. Ruxton was convicted of murder, largely on the basis of forensic evidence, and sentenced to death. He confessed to the murders shortly before he was hanged.
The Ruxton case was "one of several mid-20th-century cases that really consolidated the authority of forensic medicine," Dr. Sappol said.
"Visible Proofs" also showcases a series of crime scenes reconstructed in miniature in the 1940's and 1950's by Frances Glessner Lee. Mrs. Lee, who was an heir to the International Harvester fortune, was a devotee of forensic science and, in 1943, became the first woman named as an honorary police captain in New Hampshire.
Her dollhouse-size dioramas, called the "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," provide painstaking views of the victim and his or her surroundings: from the glimmering knife left atop a pile of linens in one diorama to the pink bathroom door left ajar in another.
The visual clues on display are sufficient to figure out precisely what happened and how, Dr. Sappol said. Indeed, the dioramas, which Mrs. Lee developed as teaching tools, are still used to test forensics students in Baltimore. (And so, the National Library of Medicine does not disclose answers to the puzzles.)
Of course, the opportunity to see into a crime — and into the body — increased enormously with the advent of DNA testing, the trump card of much forensic science.
"Visible Proofs" highlights, among other stories, the case of Kirk Bloodsworth, a former commercial fisherman from Maryland who was the first person on death row to be exonerated by DNA evidence. In 1985, Mr. Bloodsworth was convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl, based largely on the testimony of five witnesses who said they had seen him with the victim.
"When I was sentenced to death, the courtroom erupted into applause," Mr. Bloodsworth, now 45, said in an interview. "I was hated." Yet Mr. Bloodsworth did not commit these crimes. In 1992, DNA testing demonstrated that sperm isolated from the victim's underwear could not have come from Mr. Bloodsworth, given signature differences between his DNA and that found in the sample.
Mr. Bloodsworth was freed in 1993.
His case was among the first worked on by the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 by the lawyers Peter J. Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck.
Post-conviction DNA testing has now exonerated at least 170 people, according to the Innocence Project. "Visible Proofs" appears at a moment when forensic findings wield enormous influence in the courtroom and in public imagination. Films and television shows like the hit series "C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation" have glamorized the image of the field as well.
On them, investigators routinely reach definitive conclusions by running chemical tests on carpet fibers and clothing samples and performing copious (and rapid) DNA analyses.
Forensic science "has taken on the kind of authority we once gave to priests and prophets," said Ronald Thomas, president of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., and author of "Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science." "In a world of great uncertainty, the public is looking for an assurance that we can penetrate the mystery and find the truth." Science is not always able to do so, he added.
"There is a growing accumulation of knowledge, which leads to the possibility of more just results," Dr. Sappol said. "But it is not a sure shot."
The National Library of Medicine exhibit does not highlight cases in which DNA tests and other forensic results have proved susceptible to error or bias. But a number of such cases have come to light in recent years in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere.
In 2003, William C. Thompson, a professor in the department of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, helped demonstrate that DNA testing by the Houston police crime lab led to the wrongful rape conviction of a man named Josiah Sutton in 1999. When the error was uncovered and further testing performed, Mr. Sutton was exonerated.
Forensic scientists often work closely with law enforcement officials and, "without even realizing it, they can adopt the law enforcement perspective and begin interpreting evidence in a manner slanted in favor of the prosecution's case," Dr. Thompson said.
Forensic analysts may also be captive to their field's exalted status and thus have difficulty admitting mistakes or explaining inconclusive test results.
"They're under a lot of pressure to fix things," Dr. Thompson said. "If you look closely at what's going on in fraud cases, often analysts are not trying to frame people, but they're covering up control failures or errors in the experimental process."
"The irony is that just as forensics experts are riding a wave of credibility inspired by shows like 'C.S.I.,' " he continued, "a surprising number of DNA analysts have been caught faking data."
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
posted by Professor Segal | 10:19 AM
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