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b.
Corroboration or Refutation of Statements
Frequently detectives will elicit statements from victims, suspects, and wit-
nesses about an incident. One way to establish the veracity of these accounts
is via a reconstruction. If the physical evidence fails to support a particular
statement, then the detective can use this information in further questioning.
This type of reconstruction can also be used during testimony to corroborate
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or refute statements made during the investigation, or in previous testimony
by other witnesses. Corroborative reconstruction is generally easier because
it is, by definition, focused on a specific proposition or hypothesis that has
been proposed by someone else. In this context, the expert is asked to com-
ment on whether an event could have happened as it was related by the
witness, and examination of the physical evidence is directed toward answer-
ing this question.
A typical example is a suspect relating that he was acting in self-defense.
One such case involved a shooting death, where the suspect insisted that he
was simply defending himself from the victim. He described a scenario
where the victim was attacking him with a hatchet poised over his head,
ready to strike. In fact, a hatchet was found on a small table next to where
the victim was shot, so a real possibility existed that the suspect was telling
the truth. The table was covered in fine blood droplets obviously resulting
from the fatal shot to the victim’s head. The question related to whether
the hatchet was on the table or in the victim’s hand when he was shot. The
criminalists first sprayed the area with luminol with the hatchet still in place.
Fine blood spatter could be seen on the table and hatchet. They then
removed the hatchet and repeated the luminol test. A dark shadow (indi-
cating the absence of blood) appeared in the shape of the hatchet, sur-
rounded by the glow of fine blood spatter on the rest of the table. This
convincingly demonstrated that the victim did not have the hatchet in his
hand when the shot was fired, refuting the suspect’s story of self-defense.
This case provides an effective demonstration of how a thoughtful analysis
of physical evidence, performed with the specific reconstruction question in
mind, successfully assisted in establishing a factual element of the case.