Chain of Custody

The chain of custody is a vital part of the collection of evidence process as allows the people working on the investigation to know what evidence has been found at the scene as well as the information that comes with it such as the officer who collected it and the time and date of collection. Once a piece of evidence has been found it has to be collected by a scenes of crime officer and bagged and tagged in the appropriate way with all the vital information about the evidence labelled on the tag, the evidence would then handed over to the exhibits log officer at the scene who then fills out all the necessary information in the log about the evidence they have received. The evidence and log is then sent to a laboratory to be analysed by forensic scientists where they will use the log to identify what evidence they are dealing with as well as making sure that all the pieces of evidence that are listed in the log are there. Once the forensic scientists have analysed the evidence they would sign the chain of chain of custody stating that the evidence listed was in their possession at a certain point.

OJ Simpson

In the OJ Simpson case where he allegedly killed Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman a chain of custody was used by there was a lot of doubts about how reliable it actually was due to the amount of evidence that was collected but not actually recorded using the chain of custody. This resulted in theories being created which claimed that the police and scenes of crime officers were actually planting evidence, an example of evidence that was collected but not recorded in the chain of custody would be the drops of blood that were found at the crime scene which scenes of crimes officers thought was OJ Simpsons, it was later found that test tube filled with blood was not sent straight to the lab for inspection, it was left at the police station for many hours before actually making its way to the lab to be analysed which further increased suspicion that evidence was being tampered with.