MÉTODO HOLMESIANO E SUA INFLUÊNCIA À LUZ DA PEDOLOGIA FORENSE

Abstract

There are many stories about the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and in one of the most famous of these, he applies observation and deduction to tell that his friend has been to a certain place by the type of “dirt” on his shoe. In criminal investigations there are several methods of analysis to reach the conclusion of the real suspects and to elucidate the cause of death, and one of these analyzes is with soil traces. Criminals hardly ever notice a detail: a little bit of clay adhered to the shoe’s sole or to the skin can allow specialists in soil analysis to confirm whether a person or object was part of a crime scene or not. Soil constitutes strong evidence capable of connecting a suspect or object to a certain position in space, due to its potential for transfer and persistence on different surfaces. Thus, the soil can be used for investigative purposes during the police investigation with the purpose of validating or comparing traces, and can be included in the police files to be presented at hearings of criminal actions. The data obtained for this bibliographic review were collected from detective novels, articles and papers found in websites specializing in academic subjects through keywords on the theme studied in this article. The results found are prosperous in the area of forensic pedology, and propose to integrate different areas of knowledge and provide technical-scientific support to the various investigations related to justice. In this way, this review article showed that the deduction made by Holmes more than 130 years ago is validated by scientific articles in the area of pedology today.