PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984)
Definition
UK legislation governing police investigative powers, including the code of practice requiring audio (and later video) recording of police interviews, a reform driven partly by the disputed handwritten interview records in the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four cases.
Related terms
- 3D Optical Scanning
- Non-contact surface topography measurement using structured light or white-light interferometry to produce a nanometre-resolution height map of the document surface; an alternative...
- Birmingham Six
- Six men wrongly convicted in 1975 of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings; their convictions were quashed in 1991 partly on the basis...
- Corona Wire
- A high-voltage wire in the ESDA instrument that deposits electrostatic charge uniformly over the Mylar surface; charge density is higher at points...
- ESDA (Electrostatic Detection Apparatus)
- A non-destructive technique for detecting indented impressions on paper caused by writing pressure. A physical ink signature on paper produces detectable ESDA...
- ESDA Lift
- The permanent transparent Mylar sheet carrying the toner-developed image of the indented writing, produced by ESDA processing; suitable for court exhibition and...
- Foster+Freeman ESDA 2
- The current-generation commercial ESDA instrument (Foster+Freeman Ltd, Worcestershire, UK), used by the FBI Laboratory, DSTL (UK), Australian Federal Police, CFSL (India), and...
- Indented Writing
- Latent impressions produced in paper sheets beneath the writing sheet by the pressure of the pen tip; invisible under normal illumination but...
- Mylar Film
- A thin (approximately 6 micrometre) polyester film stretched over the document under vacuum in the ESDA process; it conforms to the document...
- Sequence Evidence
- In ESDA casework, the determination of the relative order in which pages in a notepad were written, based on which impressions appear...
Explained in
- Indented Writing and the ESDA Electrostatic Detection ApparatusUK legislation governing police investigative powers, including the code of practice requiring audio (and later video) recording of police interviews, a reform...