Welcome to this new video. So, what to check in statements, if the issue regards the activities? Well, a good starting point is the audit template that is provided to you in the guideline. But I will give you here very concrete things to check while reading reports. First, if the issues are revolving around activities in the case, the evaluative report should give guidance at the same level. This is especially true when minute quantities of material have been analyzed. If a report is solely concerned with issues at source, this is not acceptable. For the safe administration of justice, more is required for marine forensic scientists. In other words, don't accept laziness and allow scientists to avoid the difficult questions. Is it okay for the report to list all the possible explanations for the transfer of the recovered material? Clearly, the answer is no. The findings should not be left open-ended. A report saying for example that there is a multiple set of mechanisms that may lead to the observations. Although, that may be an appropriate course of action in the investigative phase. It is not helpful for evaluating the strength to be attached to the findings. The reason is that the court will be left choosing between these options without guidance. At times, scientists will under examination-in-chief or during cross examination, they will rank the plausibility of each explanation put forward to them. Our experience is that it is often plagued with transposition of the conditional and does not conform to the balanced approach which we are advocating. Hence on such complex issues, we cannot leave the matter to oral debate in court. Precedence should be given to written submissions. That allow each party to be able to critically review the submissions. Some forensic laboratories will have a practice to produce very short statements but keeping long detailed laboratory nodes. We tend to prefer longer report, and at the very least, asking systematically for the laboratory nodes. When it comes to data, is a mere opinion from the scientist enough. Well, it depends. It depends on what basis this opinion has been formed. It is expected that the scientist is able to disclose the body of data and knowledge used to assign the probabilities associated to the observations. Given the alleged activities. Again, precedence should be given two written statements. Please check in every report that the findings have been assessed in a balanced way. It always come to consider at least two proposition. In the report, do we have a clear position as to the probability of the findings given the activity alleged by the prosecution and also a section dealing with probability of a findings given the alleged activities by the defense. Failure to observe these two distinct consideration will contravene to good practice. Is it enough to stay the bottom line, to stay the degree of support, the findings lend towards one version of Evans versus the other. In our view, it is not sufficiently candid. The report should progress first with a detailed analysis of the results under both propositions and not focus only on the bottom line that is to say, the likelihood ratio. A last thing to check is the question to know if the assumptions and k's information are duly acknowledged in the report. In our view, this question is intrinsically linked with the issue of ethics. The ethics of a good forensic scientists means that by obligation, any limitation and assumption should be disclosed. It is not adequate to wait for the parties to fish and expose the limitations for questioning. If any limitation is known to the scientist, it should be exposed and disclosed. Ethics requires full disclosure. We have seen with the Butler case that even if the person contests that it is his DNA and says he has not committed the crime, then we must consider activity level prepositions. This is true, when there is very little material. Factors such as transfer, persistence, presence for reasons unconnected to the crime must be taken into account in our evaluation. With the new in case, we have seen that if a result is too complex to give the value, then we should not even compare this profile to the person of interest as Franco mentioned. We have outlined that results can support defense proposition, if we consider the activities and not only the source. And in the [inaudible] case, we demonstrated that in his case, the results supported the defense. It is logical that our results depending on the case information, should also favor the defense and not always prosecutions. It shows that it is balanced. With Christophe, you have seen the important element checking statement where the quantity of material recovered is small. The main point are as follows. One, the scientists should not provide explanation at court or in evolutive report. This is better adapted to the investigative process. Two, is not safe to leave the debate regarding the evaluation given activity level proposition to court. This should be done in a wrapper for the equality of arms and also quality assurance. Three, our assessment must be based on data, as defined in the ENFSI guideline that is," Scientific publication, database or internal reports or expert knowledge built upon experiment conducted under controlled condition that include case-specific experiment, training, and experience". Thank you for watching.
