Output details

An initial analysis of forensic evidence used in the prosecution of terrorism cases in Britain between 1972 and 2008

This output presents the results of an empirical study, which examines the types of forensic evidence used in the prosecution of terrorist cases in the United Kingdom. It adopts a comparative approach between cases relative to the IRA, and those relative to Al Qaeda-inspired attacks. This is the first empirical study to examine the relationship between categories of evidence and sentence length, the relative evidentiary value between different categories, or whether, as the study established, different categories of evidence distinguished between different cases (IRA vs. AQ-inspired). Unique access was granted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to archives of prosecuted terrorist cases. Concrete implications for case prosecution and crime scene processing are laid out in the paper and fed back to the CPS.