News From the World of Crime

 

More and more, law officers are turning to GPS technology as an aid to helping combat crime, although they can be a bit cagey about how they use it: "We don't really want to give any info on how we use it as an investigative tool to help the bad guys," said Officer Shelley Broderick, a Fairfax, Virginia, police spokeswoman. As a recent Washington Post article pointed out,

Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell's Big Brother society. Law enforcement officials, when they discuss the issue at all, said GPS is essentially the same as having an officer trail someone, just cheaper and more accurate. Most of the time, as was done in the Foltz case [in which a GPS unit was placed on a suspect's Jaguar], judges have sided with police.

A new tool in forensic science is a breakthrough by scientists in Texas that can provide gunshot residue analysis on a single gunpowder particle. As Garrett Lee Burleson explained at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society,

"Gunshot residue tests are done in almost every case where a shooting has taken place. The main focus of our research is to develop a method that will help credibility of gunshot residue evidence in court. You can get results with this test in 30 to 40 minutes with the new test. In addition you only need small amounts of evidence to run the test."

Burleson added that a recent trend toward lead-free ammunition has decreased reliability of gun shot residue analysis and created the need for smarter tests to identify more diverse components of residue in gunpowder.

Speaking of guns, tiny tags, just 30 microns in diameter and invisible to the naked eye, have been designed to be coated onto gun cartridges. They then attach themselves to the hands or gloves of anyone handling the cartridge and are very difficult to wash off completely. Some of these "nanotags" also remain on the cartridge even after it has been fired. This should make it possible to establish a "robust forensic link" between a cartridge fired during a crime and whoever handled it. The technology could be available for use within as little as 12 months.

A very real crime may have been the inspiration for the original Superman. The UK's Daily Mail Online wrote that the brutal killing of immigrant Mitchell Siegel at the hands of a gang who robbed his clothes shop in Cleveland, Ohio, is what was spurred his son, Jerry Siegel (along with Joe Schuster)  to create the famous comic book icon. As the article pointes out, faced with the brutal death of his father at the hands of a bunch of thugs, the young man's sadness and anger inspired him to create a superhuman crimefighter who was impervious to bullets and who had himself lost his father. "Think about it," says thriller writer Brad Meltzer. "Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world's greatest hero."

Now for a little bit of "woo woo": police in New Zealand interviewed two TV psychics earlier this month in hopes of obtaining a lead in the disappearance of a woman back in 2005. Prominent defence lawyer John Billington said he doubted that a psychic's evidence would be admissible in court.