Ethical and Legal Issues
While Crime scene analysis is very helpful in the world, it does involve various legal and ethical issues. When a scientist enters a house to investigate, he has to legally consider a variety of steps in order to conserve the evidence. He or she also has to consider what is and is not allowed in court. The main concern with all of this investigation is privacy. With DNA from a person or an object of that person, a scientist can find out countless information about that person. “DNA can provide insights into many intimate aspects of people and their families including susceptibility to particular diseases, legitimacy of birth, and perhaps predispositions to certain behaviors and sexual orientation. This information increases the potential for genetic discrimination by government, insurers, employers, schools, banks, and others” (www.ornl.gov). In addition, not all states require scientists to destroy the DNA of someone even after a conviction has been overturned. Because someone’s DNA samples may still be stored, their entire genome could be available to anyone and everyone. Not only is this ethically a concern, but practicality remains a concern too. There is not enough room to store, and never get rid of, everybody’s DNA. “An enormous backlog of over half a million DNA samples waits to be entered into the CODIS system. The statute of limitations has expired in many cases in which the evidence would have been useful for conviction.”
“Civil liberties advocates say that Katie's Bill still raises the question of Fourth Amendment violations against unreasonable search and seizure and stress that the law could be abused to justify arrests made on less than probable cause just to obtain DNA evidence.”
From both an ethical and legal outlook, it is obvious that investigators should not remove personal belongings from crime scenes. While one would imagine that police and forensic scientists want to protect the honesty of their investigation, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), as well as the Canadian Society of Forensic Science, provides no guidelines for crime scene ethics or the retention of items from former crime scenes.
Obligations to the community do change depending on whether or not the research is publicly or privately funded. If research is publicly funded, then the researchers are more obliged to listen to the community's wants and needs because they are the people funding them. However, when research is privately funded, researchers tend to have more say in their research because it is not the entire community funding them. Although, they do have rather high obligations to the few people contributing to the research.
The major ethical issue is privacy of DNA. The legal practices sometimes have the potential to jepordize this privacy because when a person is convicted a more serious crimes, some states require information to be made public. Most of the time, the legal practices protect privacy rights, however, there are always exceptions.
Legal practices and regulations related to crime scene analysis vary widely from country to country. Some countries practice the "eye for an eye" theory more regularly than others. In these countries, there also tends to be no actual legal practices set up and there is more than likely no court system in place. With such polar opposite regulations from country to country, it sometimes makes it difficult to even compare the lifestyles and legal matters in crime scene investigations.