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Articles » Crime Scene And
Physical Evidence
Forensic
Animation
Alison Port
Cartoons aren't just for kids on a Saturday morning. Over the past decade, forensic animation has developed to provide a feasible picture of what happened. Typically, in forensic animation, an expert studies all the data available from, for example, a car crash or a suspicious death and then asks a computer to perform calculations of the objects in motion and to recreate a visual picture. This program is made by SGI and is officially dubbed Maya.
Last year in an Idaho court case, Maya was used to recreate the scene of the crime to determine if 11 month old Casey Whiteside was killed by an accidental tumble down the stairs or her mother's boyfriend. Using the computer program, FBI expert Carl Adrian entered data like the baby's weight, shape and dimensions along with the staircase's measurements. Maya then used the laws of physics to determine what kind of injuries a child would sustain and then converted this simulation into a ten-minute movie. Maya came to the conclusion that Casey could not have received such serious skull fractures from a tumble down the stairs. The jury agreed and convicted the mother's boyfriend of murder.
Some scholars warn of Maya's influence over a jury. Might the jury not have been so sure about Casey's death if they hadn't seen a video practically documenting the possible murder? James Starrs, a professor at George Washington University, sees the danger in such a sophisticated program warning that high quality simulations can give jurors the false impression that they're witnessing the crime and allow them to easily forget other evidence.
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McCormick, John. "Scene of the Crime." Newsweek. February 28, 2000.
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