The First Successful Use of a Low Stringency Familial Match in a French Criminal Investigation

We describe how a very simple application of familial searching resolved a decade‐old, high‐profile rape/murder in France. This was the first use of familial searching in a criminal case using the French STR DNA database, which contains approximately 1,800,000 profiles. When an unknown forensic profile (18 loci) was searched against the French arrestee/offender database using CODIS configured for a low stringency search, a single low stringency match was identified. This profile was attributed to the father of the man suspected to be the source of the semen recovered from the murder victim Elodie Kulik. The identification was confirmed using Y‐chromosome DNA from the putative father, an STR profile from the mother, and finally a tissue sample from the exhumed body of the man who left the semen. Because of this identification, the investigators are now pursuing possible co‐conspirators.     

The Effect of Light Exposure on the Degradation of Latent Fingerprints on Brass Surfaces: The Use of Silver Electroless Deposition as a Visualization Technique

We have studied the degradation of sebaceous fingerprints on brass surfaces using silver electroless deposition (SED) as a visualization technique. We have stored fingerprints on brass squares either (i) in a locked dark cupboard or (ii) in glass‐filtered natural daylight for periods of 3 h, 24 h, 1 week, 3 weeks, and 6 weeks. We find that fingerprints on brass surfaces degrade much more rapidly when kept in the light than they do under dark conditions with a much higher proportion of high‐quality prints found after 3 or 6 weeks of aging when stored in the dark. This process is more marked than for similar fingerprints on black PVC surfaces. Identifiable prints can be achieved on brass surfaces using both SED and cyanoacrylate fuming (CFM). SED is quick and straightforward to perform. CFM is more time‐consuming but is versatile and can be applied to a wider range of metal surfaces than SED, for example brass surfaces which have been coated by a lacquer.     

Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda: Popular Challenges to the Official Discourse of Post-Genocide National Unity

Reconciliation is among the most contested terms in current peacebuilding and transitional justice debates. Critics often view reconciliation as romantic—expecting immediate harmony after enormous harm—or imposed on victims by religious groups or governments that prefer the language of ‘moving on’ to addressing systemic causes of conflict. This essay reconsiders the concept of ‘reconciliation’ by drawing on community-level experiences in post-genocide Rwanda. This context highlights nuanced interpretations of reconciliation that, in key respects, respond to critics' concerns and call for reappraisal of reconciliation as a central objective after mass violence. In particular, many Rwandans' participation in the gacaca community courts—which, between 2002 and 2012, prosecuted 400,000 genocide suspects in around 1 million cases in 11,000 jurisdictions overseen by locally elected lay judges—represents a form of negotiated reconciliation. This version emphasizes long-term formal and informal negotiations between antagonistic parties during gacaca hearings but crucially long after trials have ended. In contrast, the transactional reconciliation advocated by the Rwandan government through its discourse of ‘national unity’ views reconciliation as immediate and elite-imposed—a perspective that rightly raises the ire of critics but to which negotiated reconciliation offers an important riposte. This essay is based on more than 650 interviews between 2003 and 2014 with Rwandan genocide suspects, convicted perpetrators, survivors, gacaca judges and policymakers as well as observations of 105 gacaca hearings in 13 communities across Rwanda.     

A rhetoric of style: Eleanor Rigby and the reordering of popular music

In this paper, we present a synthesis of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric of identification and Jay Lemke’s social semiotics to frame Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles as a unique point in the phylogenesis of recorded popular music. We emphasise the social semiotic functioning of string arrangements as styles, with style also being understood in the manner of Burke, and style names and definitions being drawn from a corpus analysis of string arrangements for popular music. We argue that, through a rhetoric of style, Eleanor Rigby made canonical claims against rock's cultural counterpart, classical music. We demonstrate the working of the rhetoric and its political implications in the context of the counter-cultural forces active during the mid-1960s.