Forensic

Application of scientific information to legal and criminal settings. “Forensics” involves a wide range of specialties from natural and social science disciplines that apply information, research, and methods to criminal and legal evidence. Such disciplines include psychology, science, anthropology, computing, and pathology. Forensic is derived from the Latin forensis, which refers to a forum. A forum was used in ancient Rome as a place of business, public, governmental, and legal affairs. It gradually became a commonly used word in the English language with the growth of forensic medicine (later becoming forensic pathology). In modern society, the word forensic is restricted to disciplines that are applied to the collection, examination, and analysis of evidence pertaining to criminal and legal settings. New forensic techniques for examining crime scenes are important and have revolutionized the study of evidence for trials, resulting in more definitive or less ambiguous guilty and innocent court decisions. But many of these techniques are time-consuming tasks that technicians undertake in laboratories or painstaking examinations of crime scenes. Although forensics is a more recent phenomenon, there is currently an influx of forensic-related programs on television that have become widely popular with the viewing audience. With the increase of both fictional and nonfictional stories of crimes and legal cases reported in the media, there is now a concern that these programs confuse audiences, presenting a glamour that is lacking in the real work of technicians and scientists, misleading techniques, and incorrect information regarding forensics.