8127/frame/fm

 
Purpose
The purpose is where you have a chance to translate the legal
question into a scientific question. Why are you bothering to
perform scientific examinations on this evidence? What are you
hoping to learn? Inclusion of a purpose is standard practice in
scientific articles.
3.
 
List of evidence received and examined
All of the evidence received by the analyst should be listed, and
the evidence that was examined or analyzed should be specified.
4.
 
Examination and results
In this section, you should briefly describe the tests or compari-
sons that were performed (the gory details should be in your
notes), and the results you obtained. If frequencies or statistics are
used in assessing the strength of the data, the data and their
sources should be explicated.
5.
 
Interpretation and conclusion
In this section, you should summarize the reasoning behind your
conclusion. Depending on the particular evidence, this section
might be very brief or quite lengthy. At the end you should provide
a 
 
conclusion
— in other words, your 
 
opinion
of what the results
mean in the context of the case. This statement will be recycled
in the initial summary section, perhaps with slightly different
wording intended for a lay audience.
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278
Principles and Practice of Criminalistics
The following is an example of a situation in which a laboratory abused
its discretion regarding the contents of a report.
In the previous chapter, we presented a case in which a state DNA laboratory
interpreted the collective results from several genetic analyses to mean that,