This article offers a critical overview of expert identification evidence based on images. It reviews the Australian case law and then, in an interdisciplinary manner, endeavours to explain methodological, technical and theoretical problems with facial mapping evidence. It suggests that extant admissibility jurisprudence and traditional safeguards associated with expert opinion evidence and the adversarial trial might not adequately protect those accused of committing criminal acts when they are confronted with incriminating expert identification evidence.

This article examines the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, evidence is adduced by the prosecution in order to narrate and prove the facts supporting the charges. Strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial, and where evidence has been improperly obtained, or where it may be irrelevant or unreliable, or if is misleading, confusing or unfair, the evidence may be excluded. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional 'archive' and sometimes continues to proliferate culturally, but subject to no rules nor standards. This article examines some instances in which criminal evidence has been accessed and used post-trial, and asks whether these cultural practices constitute risk or opportunity, or something more benign. Crime's archive has aroused the interest of artists, publishers, scholars, curators and journalists who have accessed it by various methods, and used it for a wide range of purposes, some of which might be transgressive, dangerous or insensitive. This article explores what is at stake in accessing crime's archive and prolonging the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. It responds, in part, to Eamonn Carrabine's call for a 'critically engaged visual criminology' (2012: 487). For Carrabine, criminology's 'cultural turn' has made scholars more attentive to the transformation of 'traumatic experiences into visual art'

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hat happens to a country under constant surveillance? The recent decision in Atkins v The Queen provides a partial answer. 1 The sheer availability of images seems to be driving decisions about their admissibility and use as identification evidence. Confronted with CCTV recordings associated with criminal activities English courts have been reluctant to restrict their admission or impose limitations on the scope or form of incriminating opinion derived from them. Although the Court of Appeal decision in Atkins v The Queen is concerned primarily with the way in which an opinion derived from CCTV images was expressed, the decision exposes jurisprudential weakness and continuing problems with photo comparison and facial-mapping evidence.

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