Chapter 35 — Self-Check Quiz

24 questions: multiple choice and short answer. Try them closed-book. The answer key is in the collapsed block at the bottom.

Multiple choice

1. Disaster victim identification (DVI) is best described as: - A. A new set of forensic methods invented for disasters - B. The same evidentiary methods applied at a scale that overwhelms the routine system - C. A way of determining the cause of a disaster - D. The recovery of property from a disaster scene

2. A "mass fatality" is defined by: - A. More than 100 deaths - B. Any event involving an aircraft - C. More dead than the local death-investigation system can handle with routine resources - D. Any death from a natural disaster

3. "Commingled remains" means: - A. Remains that have decomposed - B. The remains of two or more individuals mixed together, requiring re-association - C. Remains that have been cremated - D. Remains found far from the scene

4. The five Interpol DVI phases, in order, are: - A. Antemortem, postmortem, scene, reconciliation, debriefing - B. Scene, postmortem, antemortem, reconciliation, debriefing - C. Recovery, identification, notification, burial, review - D. Scene, reconciliation, postmortem, antemortem, debriefing

5. The three primary identifiers are: - A. Clothing, jewelry, tattoos - B. Fingerprints, dental records, DNA - C. Height, weight, eye color - D. Witness statements, wallet, vehicle

6. In the Interpol framework, the postmortem and antemortem records are: - A. Built by the same team to save time - B. Built independently and compared only at reconciliation (Phase 4) - C. Never compared - D. Compared before the bodies are examined

7. The reason for keeping postmortem and antemortem data separate until reconciliation is primarily: - A. Legal jurisdiction - B. To avoid confirmation bias — describing the dead on their own terms before fitting them to an expected identity - C. To save money - D. Because the two teams speak different languages

8. A "secondary identifier" (e.g., a wristwatch found with a body): - A. Can confirm an identification on its own - B. Is worthless and should be ignored - C. Can support, guide, and corroborate an identification but generally cannot confirm one alone - D. Is more reliable than DNA

9. Fingerprints as a disaster identifier require: - A. Only surviving fingertip skin - B. Surviving fingertip skin AND an existing print record to search against - C. Only a database record - D. A confession

10. Dental identification comes into its own in disasters because teeth: - A. Are unique in every person regardless of records - B. Survive fire and decomposition that destroy fingerprints and soft tissue - C. Cannot be damaged by any disaster - D. Are faster to analyze than fingerprints in all cases

11. A capability that DNA has in mass-fatality work that fingerprints and dental records do not is: - A. Being cheaper than the others - B. Re-associating commingled remains by grouping fragments that share a profile - C. Working instantly - D. Requiring no reference sample

12. "Kinship matching" in DVI means: - A. Matching a body's profile directly to the victim's own reference - B. Comparing a body's profile to biological relatives' profiles to test a claimed relationship, expressed as a likelihood ratio - C. Matching victims to each other - D. A DNA test that names the killer

13. Compared with a direct DNA match, kinship matching is: - A. Always stronger - B. Generally weaker and more interpretation-heavy, especially for distant relationships - C. Identical in strength - D. Not based on DNA

14. In a reconciliation matrix, an exclusion (emptying a cell): - A. Is less reliable than a positive match - B. Is the cleaner, more confident result — a single unexplainable discrepancy excludes a candidate - C. Requires convergence of three identifiers - D. Can only be done with DNA

15. A single dental or kinship match is weaker when drawn from a pool of hundreds than from a two-person problem because: - A. The lab is more tired - B. In a large pool, broadly similar mouths or compatible kinship patterns can coincide by chance - C. Large pools are illegal - D. DNA stops working at scale

16. The safeguard DVI uses against a weak single match in a large event is: - A. Guessing - B. Convergence across two or more independent primary identifiers - C. Using secondary identifiers alone - D. Notifying families faster

17. A formal "Identification Board" exists to: - A. Speed up identifications by skipping review - B. Ensure that no single examiner's confidence substitutes for a documented, multi-disciplinary, reviewable decision - C. Decide who is guilty - D. Manage the media

18. A victim may remain unidentified even with a complete postmortem record because: - A. The science always fails eventually - B. No antemortem record exists to reconcile against (no dentist, no prints on file, no relatives located, never reported missing) - C. DNA is unreliable - D. The body decomposed

Short answer

19. In two sentences, explain why "no single identifier works for every victim in a disaster," and why DVI therefore runs all three primary identifiers in parallel.

20. Name the two intertwined goals of human-rights / mass-grave forensics, and state in one phrase why they can be in tension.

21. A mass-grave anthropologist finds perimortem gunshot trauma. State what this establishes and the one thing it cannot establish from the bone alone (echoing Chapter 12).

22. Why is a misidentification in a mass fatality described as a "double catastrophe"? Name both harms.

23. Explain why DVI's conservatism — leaving a body unidentified rather than guessing — is a duty to families rather than mere bureaucratic caution.

24. Using the Chapter 35 Case File, name two ways the single-victim identification of Marcus Diallo (Chapter 17) was easier than a mass-fatality reconciliation, and state what the aside adds to the cold case.

Answer key (click to expand) **Multiple choice:** 1-B · 2-C · 3-B · 4-B · 5-B · 6-B · 7-B · 8-C · 9-B · 10-B · 11-B · 12-B · 13-B · 14-B · 15-B · 16-B · 17-B · 18-B **Short answer (model points):** **19.** Disasters damage bodies in method-specific ways — fire destroys fingerprints but spares teeth; fragmentation may leave a printable finger but no jaws; explosion may leave only tissue for DNA — so the condition that defeats one identifier often spares another. Running all three in parallel covers a victim population that no single method could, because each victim is identified by whichever identifier their remains and records permit. **20.** **Humanitarian** (recover and identify the dead so families of the missing can learn their relatives' fate and grieve) and **judicial** (gather evidence of atrocity crimes for prosecution). They can be in tension because they compete for the same scarce resources and even the same remains — a family wants remains returned now; a tribunal may need the grave and remains preserved as evidence. **21.** It establishes that the victim suffered a perimortem gunshot injury — a physical fact about how they died. It cannot, from the bone alone, establish *who* fired the shot or gave the order; responsibility comes from the convergence of other evidence (testimony, documents, chain of command), exactly the limit of Chapter 12. **22.** Family A buries and grieves around the *wrong* remains (and may never learn the error), while family B's person is mislabeled and effectively lost in the system, leaving them waiting in vain. One error inflicts two distinct, lasting harms — and surfacing the error later reopens the first family's grief and compounds the second's. **23.** A misidentification is among the cruelest errors the science can commit (the double catastrophe of Q22), so DVI would rather leave a body unidentified — telling a family "we are not sure yet," painful as that is — than make a fast call that might be wrong. The whole framework (primary identifiers, the Identification Board, convergence) exists to keep the promise "we will not hand you the wrong body," which is a duty owed to families, not bureaucratic caution. **24.** Any two: there was no commingling to resolve (one body, indisputably one person); the antemortem record already existed and pointed at one named individual (a presumptive identity from the start); and the candidate pool was effectively one, so a strong dental concordance was decisive on its own (the prosecutor's-fallacy worry did not arise). **What the aside adds:** nothing evidentiary — it is a teaching comparison with no new facts about Diallo's death or any suspect; the identification stands exactly as Chapter 17 left it.