Criminal Investigation

Causality is not often disputed in criminal prosecutions because the nature of the exposure (eg, gunshot, knife, blunt trauma) is strongly associated with the injury outcome (penetrating wound, skull fracture, etc.) such that causality is determined as a matter of common sense. In some cases that are prosecuted criminally, however, there are questions that require a reliable analysis of comparative risk in order to assess pivotal probabilistic issues pertaining to guilt or innocence. In this chapter a variety of examples of how forensic epidemiology methods are used in both the prosecution and defense of criminal matters are presented, illustrating the flexibility and duplicability of the methods