ABSTRACT

One activity which distinguishes criminalistics from other related scientific fields such as analytical chemistry is the need to attain the highest degrees of discrimination between very similar samples in attempts to approach the goal of individualization. This goal is desirable in casework dealing with evidence which is used to demonstrate a link between a suspect and a victim or a suspect and a scene. Such evidence is often referred to as associative evidence. To truly attain individualization with this type of evidence it would be necessary to show that the two items being compared are more similar to each other than they are to any other like objects in the universe. Stated somewhat differently, the comparison should be good enough, in the context of the variation within the population of like items, to allow the inference to be drawn that the two items share a unique common origin.