Dawson Times

North Georgia College & State University has established a new criminal forensics concentration within the Bachelor of Science degree in criminal justice this fall. The six-course concentration offers criminal justice majors a forensics program focused on investigative techniques that augment their studies within the field.

The behavioral-based criminal forensics program is the only one of its kind in the state. It is centered on exposing future law enforcement practitioners to the evaluation of crime scenes, evidence and putting together "a picture of what happened." The only other program in the University System of Georgia is through Albany State and its focus is on lab forensics.

"Many people have a concept of forensics where they view it solely as practitioners working in labs and processing evidence coming in from the field," says Joe Morgan, the program’s academic advisor. "Equally as important, and what this program focuses on, is the preservation, collection, security and processing of evidence at a crime scene and getting it back into the hands of those people in the labs."

A team of four professors are teaching the concentration, composed of courses in criminal typology, criminal investigation, evidence, criminalistics and death investigations.

Political science and criminal justice department head Leo Downing says that forensics education is an emerging area of study. He notes that with an increasingly scientific society, juries expect scientific proof to establish a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

"As forensics becomes more technical, we need experts in evidence collection, evidence analysis, criminal investigation and other areas."

Morgan is working toward developing the program into an academic minor for any undergraduate at North Georgia who might have an interest in forensics.

"There’s a tremendous amount of cross-disciplinary application here," says Morgan, who has a master’s in Forensic Science. "Many professions have a forensic dimension. Experts in a particular field have to be able to put into practice that forensic aspect, such as when an entomologist collects an insect specimen at a crime scene and understanding how that might affect the outcome of a court case."

Sharon Matherson wants to pursue a career in forensics but needed the chemistry background so that she could compete for a job in a forensics lab. "The classes are exposing me to understanding how evidence will get into the lab and the various procedures it takes to collect evidence," Matherson says.

Over the summer, a curriculum overlap in her death investigation and biochemistry courses was an exciting moment for Matherson. "In the forensics class, we talked about rigor mortis and learned briefly about the biological systems that cause rigor, and in biochemistry, we talked about how glycolysis affects the process."

"We’re here to expose students to theory and interlace it with practical application," Morgan says. "The program sets a foundation for a lot of different disciplines that might have some professional connection to forensics."

For more information, please contact Joe Morgan, Asst. Professor of Criminal Justice at NGCSU at       jsmorgan@ngcsu.edu.