Expert Light Sources as an Instrumental Method for Detecting Human Teeth and Bone Remains: Features and Problems of Application in the Production of Accident Scene Examination

The article discusses the principles, features and problematic aspects of the use of expert light sources during the accident scene examination in order to detect human teeth and bone remains, located in a concealing environment – an array of inert materials close to them in color, making it difficult to detect the desired objects by visual inspection of the material environment. Purpose: to study the effectiveness of the use of expert light sources during the accident scene examination for the detection of human dental fragments and bone remains and to form a tactical set of rules and recommendations for working with them. As a result of experimental research using objects of forensic medicalcriminalistic examination (expert examination of a skull of an unidentified corpse in order to obtain identification information and restore the lifetime appearance) with a postmortem period of more than 20 years (four molars with preserved root cement, one tooth root fragment, one dental prosthesis and four fragments of sphenoidal bone of the human skull) and illuminators generating optical radiation in the spectral ranges 365, 395, 430-440 nm, the author establishes that expert light sources allow effective detection of human dental and bone fragments located in a nonfluorescent concealing environment, which creates a distracting background during visual inspection. However, they are not without a number of disadvantages, the most significant of which is the difficulty in interpreting the results obtained by an expert criminalist when finding the desired objects in an environment with fluorescent properties (in an organic, iron or phosphate-rich sedimentary environment). In order to avoid difficulties in interpreting the results of the search for human teeth and bone remains and to exclude potentially inconclusive seizures, the article proposes a set of methods for preliminary examination of objects suspected to be human teeth or bone remains detected by expert light sources.