Labs

We conducted a few extra mini-labs that relate back to our current studies in forensics and criminal studies.

Witness Account Lab

In this lab, I worked with my usual group to cut faces out from magazine. Of course it was more than just that. Our assignment was to cut out the faces with similar sizes, cut out the prominent features (i.e. hair, nose, mouth, etc) and mix them all up in a pile. I picked a blonde lady on the cover of a magazine.  

She was very pretty until I cut her face into pieces. We all had people with different distinguishing points: a young blonde, a middle-age blonde person with short hair, a hispanic woman, and an African American woman. After having the person sitting next to ourselves look at the magazine model's profile for ten seconds, we mixed it up in the middle and had that person remake the models. I gave mine to Audrey, and she did it perfectly.

So yes, she would make a great witness. Our group got every person right perfectly, although it may have resulted from the different ethnicity of the profiles we chose.

Footprint Lab

In this lab, we analyzed each other's footprints in a tub of dirt prepared in class. We looked at the size, shape, pattern, and other distinguishing points of the print. This is my footprint below.

It was approximately 24cm in length and the widest part was 10cm.

I was wearing a sandal with the guess print running across the back, but it was too faint

for it to show up in the footprint. In the dirt, the print looked completely flat with no patterns.

The gender is hard to tell from just the footprint, because it can be a young boy or a girl.

The height chart based on foot size said that I was from 5'1 to 5'3 range. I'm a little below that

but I guess it could mean that I would still grow!!

This is Travis's footprint, and it was a lot different from the rest of ours because he

was the only guy in our group of four. It was 31 cm long and 12.5 cm wide. He was also

the only one wearing sneakers and as you can see there were distinguishing patterns

on the sole of the shoe. The brand name couldn't be seen in the print, and from the height chart,

he was assumed to be around 6'1 to 6'5, which is true. The gender is most likely to be male, although

it's never foolproof considering there are a few extremely tall women.

This is Jessica's footprint. The most distinguishing feature, as you can probably tell, is the

many dimples left on the print. The shoe size was 24 cm long and 8 cm wide. It is most likely

to be female because her shoes were the kind that is sold only to women.

Finally, this is Audrey's footprint and like me, she was wearing a pair of flipflops.

This can be recognized because both our prints were completely flat with no pattern

at all. The footprint was 27cm long and 10 cm wide. The gender also couldn't

be distinguished from this print, the height is thought to range from 5'5" and above.

Create a Profile Lab

This mini-lab is the smaller scale of the criminal investigation lab we did later on in class. Each group had five evidence to go off of to create a model of what the criminal may look like. In our group there was a lip print/blood, a ripped up note, two hair samples, and fingerprints. From these evidences we were to portray the criminal's features. We came up with an African American woman from the hair sample and the smeared lip gloss, the fingerprints couldn't tell us anything because we had nothing to compare it to, same thing occurring with the handwriting analysis. These need to be conducted after the suspects had been narrowed down because it is almost impossible to go through all the handwritings of everyone in the world.

Lip Print Lab

In this lab, all members of the class (including men) put on lip gloss and then left an imprint of their lip on a piece of notecard. We then identified five qualities about our individual lips, put them all in the middle and then had an individual sheet where once again, we left our lip print. Then we did a carousel where another group tried to match the prints by the qualities on the notecard. I used a coral color and it didn't show up very well. In the mark, my upper lip was a lot rounder than my bottom lip, there were a little space in between the lips, the lips were a regular curve on both sides without distinguishing features, and it was length was smaller than others. The group that identified ours got it 100 percent. We identified a group of six, the largest group in the class and only identified half of them correctly. There was a reason behind this, and that was because three of the six lip prints were completely messy and looked like it was rubbed against the paper so that the prints were indistinguishable. These cases, however, are often seen in real situations so it still added a piece to our knowledge that lip prints can be tampered with.

Poison Lab

poison- substances that can cause disturbance to organisms, usually by chemical reaction when sufficient quntity is absorbed by an organism.

Poisoning can result from bites, medicines, plants, lead, food poisoning, allergy, and lack of regulation by medicine.

Its symptoms are the enlarged pupils, color change of skin, drooling, and bleeding for corpses. If the individual is alive, they could show an increase in breathing rate and heartrate and nausea.

In this lab, we obtained a few samples per station to test for the presence of a possible poison.

Station 1

1. lead- because it reacted with KSCN by turning blood red
2. iron- because it turned neon yellow with the presence of Pottasium Iodide
3. cromium- because it turned orange with the presence of acid

Station 2- testing for sugar (poison for diabetics)

1. Negative
2. Negative          none of the three turned purple
3. Negative

Station 3- ammonia (odor, pH above 7, PHth turns it purple)

1. positive- ammonia
2. negative

We conducted three more similar stations using cyanide, asprine, and iodine.


Drug Lab
In this lab, we investigated three drugs: cocaine, metamphetamine, and LSD. We used SIMULATION drugs that had the same qualities as the listed drugs, but lacking the ability to make people "happy". We tested six possible drugs where the cocaine reagent turned it blue, and LSD turned it yellow. We couldn't obtain fake meth so we only performed these two tests. The second and the fourth were cocaine, the sixth was LSD and the rest were probably meth from the process of elimination.

Cocaine
1. Chemical Name: Benzoylmethylacgoine
2. .Chemical Formula: C₁₇H₂₁NO4
3.   pH: 4.5

LSD
1.  Chemical Name:  Lysergic acid diethylamide

2. Chemical Formula: C₂₀H₂₅N₃O

3. pH: 4

We had to dissolve the possible "drug" particles in thewater before usage. This needs to be conducted to test solid drugs.

This was the reaction seen in the fourth lab, where the cocaine reagent turned blue, LSD reagent was negative because it was red instead of yellow, and at the pH of 8. 

Drug testings may become important in criminal investigations to observe if an individual involved in the case was emotionally 'unstable' by the usage of illegal drugs.