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The Sherlock Effect

How Forensic Doctors and Investigators Disastrously Reason Like the Great Detective

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The Sherlock Effect

By: Thomas W. Young
Narrated by: Thomas W. Young
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About this listen

Forensic science is in crisis and at a cross-roads. Movies and television dramas depict forensic heroes with high-tech tools and dazzling intellects who - inside an hour, notwithstanding commercials - piece together past-event puzzles from crime scenes and autopsies. Likewise, Sherlock Holmes - the iconic fictional detective, and the invention of forensic doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - is held up as a paragon of forensic and scientific inspiration - does not "reason forward" as most people do, but "reasons backwards." Put more plainly, rather than learning the train of events and seeing whether the resultant clues match those events, Holmes determines what happened in the past by looking at the clues. Impressive and infallible as this technique appears to be-it must be recognized that infallibility lies only in works of fiction. Reasoning backward does not work in real life: reality is far less tidy.

In courtrooms everywhere, innocent people pay the price of life imitating art, of science following detective fiction. In particular, this book looks at the long and disastrous shadow cast by that icon of deductive reasoning, Sherlock Holmes.

©2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC (P)2021 Tantor Detective Law Social Sciences Crime Forensics Fiction Sherlock Holmes

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All stars
Most relevant
I started reading this book, due to being made aware to Deterryons case. wow what can I say, so many professionals are getting evidence so wrong, making presumptions based and what they actually don't know as wernt present and using backwards reasoning. this has opened my eyes to how professionals use their own accounts of events and how the case should be presented rather than old style reasonings of sherlock Holmes. Great read and I'll be following this case should it get reopened. I pray Deterryon doesn't give up hope and that justice is served.

Eye opener

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