Every Australian police force runs a forensic science branch, and each of them now leans heavily on genetic material to put names to unidentified people, unknown remains and cold cases that sat unsolved for decades. What once served as supporting evidence has become the central engine of identification. This sample essay follows a minute swab from a suburban kitchen in Brisbane to the witness box, then widens out to show how courts, laboratories and students across Australia are adapting to evidence that is precise, powerful and remarkably easy to mishandle.
The csen2015.org catalogue of free essay examples gives students in science, law and business a way to see how an argument is built and how an English academic register is maintained. Reading a strong model on a related subject, such as this sample tourism essay, shows the same structural habits used in tourism writing: a clear claim, signposted evidence, and a conclusion that does not simply repeat the opening. Those habits transfer neatly to forensic science writing.
Fingerprints remain the benchmark for identification. Ridge detail is durable, and a partial print lifted from a doorframe in a St Kilda terrace can still exclude or convict with extraordinary reliability. The problem is coverage: many offences involve gloves, wiped surfaces and objects that are never touched. Blood grouping and serology, while cheap and fast, exclude roughly 99 per cent of the population and have always done the bulk of the routine work.
DNA changed that arithmetic. Short tandem repeat profiling reads dozens of loci from a single cell and produces a match probability that can exceed one in a trillion. A Victorian detective might describe the older approach as "chucking a needle at a haystack and hoping it sticks", whereas a DNA result narrows the search to a person rather than a crowd. The shift has been decisive in Australia, where NSW Police opened thousands of cold-case files to re-examine evidence through Operation Auspex, and where Victorian and Queensland units built dedicated squads to work through legacy material.
The science only works if the paperwork holds. A buccal swab collected on the street, sealed in a paper bag, logged with a form and delivered to an accredited laboratory carries a weight that a plastic bag tossed into a station fridge does not. Australian analysts insist on NATA-accredited processes and ISO/IEC 17025 laboratory standards, and the Commonwealth's National Forensic Science Technology centre in Canberra operates to that standard under strict quality assurance.
Contamination is the quiet threat. A single stray hair from a technician, a touch of the inside of a glove, a sample stored next to a suspect's blood reference, and the interpretation that follows becomes worthless. Jurors rarely appreciate that the difference between conviction and acquittal can come down to a technician's cotton wool. Chain of custody documentation is therefore not administrative drudgery; it is the evidence.
New South Wales and the Commonwealth operate under their own Evidence Acts, and both demand that an expert's opinion rest on more than conjecture. The court must be satisfied the witness has relevant knowledge, that the opinion is based on facts, and that the reasoning is sound. Australian judges also expect disclosure of error rates and the limits of the database, which is why a prosecutor will call an analyst to explain the significance of a partial match rather than simply announcing "the DNA matched".
This produces a distinctly Australian style of expert evidence. Rather than delivering a confident conclusion, a good forensic scientist will set out what the sample supports, what it cannot support, and what further testing would resolve. Some defence barristers will argue the law lags the science, particularly around statistical interpretation and the treatment of low-level mixtures, where two or more individuals contributed DNA to a single mark. The lesson for anyone writing in this field is that a technically accurate claim can still fail if the legal framework around it is ignored.
The contrast between techniques is easiest to see when the requirements and caveats are set side by side. Fingerprints and serology still deliver results quickly and cheaply, but their discrimination power is limited; sequencing adds detail at a cost in time, storage and interpretation.
A quick comparison shows how the older methods stack up against modern profiling:
| Method | Sample required | Typical turnaround | Strength | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fingerprint comparison | Ridge detail from surfaces or objects | Days to weeks | Very high discrimination; stable for decades | Often partial, smudged or absent |
| Blood group and serology | Dried blood or body fluid | A few hours | Cheap, fast, long accepted in court | Excludes almost everyone tested |
| STR DNA profiling | Buccal swab, hair root, blood | One to three weeks | Individualises with very high probability | Requires a reference sample or a database hit |
| Y-STR DNA profiling | Hair shaft, semen, swab | Two to four weeks | Useful when a female sample mixes with a male donor | Identifies a paternal line, not an individual |
| Mitochondrial DNA | Hair shaft, bone, teeth | Weeks to months | Works on old or badly degraded material | Maternal lineage only; no paternal information |
| Whole genome sequencing | Fresh blood or stored reference | Several months | Greatest detail; supports unknown-surname searches | Cost, complex interpretation, privacy and storage issues |
Australia has produced results that international researchers cite. Operation Auspex in New South Wales is the most frequently mentioned, having matched evidence from unresolved offences against the state's DNA index and linked suspects to crimes that predated the database's creation. In Western Australia, the murder of a Belgian backpacker in Broome in 2005 was solved in 2019 partly through canine DNA, after a police dog named Bluey was tracked to the family that kept him. The case made the point that a genetic database can hold non-human profiles, and that investigators must read results with that possibility in mind.
Victorian and Queensland cold-case projects have since adopted similar approaches, and both states now publish regular reviews of what those reviews achieve: reopened files, charges laid, and a handful of cases dismissed because the science did not support them. Writing one of these up for an assignment follows the same discipline required in other applied fields, where a single case is examined in depth and every inference is tied to a source. Students in nursing and healthcare can see that method demonstrated in a case study analysis guide, which treats a real scenario much as a cold-case file should be treated.
Rapid DNA systems that produce a result in under two hours are now being trialled in Australian police operations, and portable sequencers that once belonged to hospital laboratories are moving into the field. Familial searching, which looks for close relatives of a suspect when no direct sample exists, is powerful and contested. It can identify people who never knew they were connected to a crime, which raises ethical questions about guilt by association and about the right to remain silent.
Data governance is another live issue. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have pressed for control over how genetic material and genomic information about their people are stored, shared and used in research, and several national initiatives now work through the details of who owns a sequence once it is uploaded. Interpretive software introduces its own risks, since automated analysis can silently bias a human analyst's first impression of a mixed profile. Few Australian cases have turned on these problems more publicly than the inquiry into false or misleading interpretations of DNA evidence at the state's level of analyst accreditation, which has driven clearer rules about who may interpret what.
Free examples exist to show structure, vocabulary and technique, and the broader catalogue of subject samples makes comparison easy. The temptation to lift whole paragraphs from them is obvious and, in Australian universities, a sure way to lose marks. Institutions such as Deakin, UniSA and the Queensland University of Technology run integrity processes that compare submitted work against external sources, and a submitted file with borrowed sentences will stand out long before a lecturer reads a word.
For students who need more support than a model answer provides, some turn to commercial services that commission an original draft from a qualified writer. A custom writing service can deliver a structured piece on a specialist topic, and the price in Australian dollars is often less than a student expects. Even so, the ethical line sits in authorship: work submitted as your own must reflect your own argument and your own research, and the referencing conventions your course expects, whether Harvard or APA, must be applied honestly.
The practical guidance is plain. Read several strong examples, note how they organise evidence and hedge appropriately, then write the piece yourself with sources you have actually opened. In a field built on chain of custody and traceability, a paper you cannot account for is the academic equivalent of a swab with no form attached it.