Challenges in the Judicial Expertise of Cultural Objects in the Digital Age

Abstract

The authors, in this paper, present the aspect of the transformations of judicial truth and forensics, as a support in obtaining it through the perspective of the digitalization of justice in the modern era. These transformations are characteristic also in the case of forensic research of cultural objects. Such objects, lately, are increasingly encountered as corpus delicti, which require forensic studies on them, in order to provide the judicial body with a specialized opinion. In the context presented, both the judiciary and judicial experts face challenges related to the natural transformations that justice is undergoing in the digital age. However, the mission of establishing scientific truth in cases, in fact, remains exclusively the responsibility of forensics. Now, legal truth is recognized as a process of establishing the circumstances of a case based on evidence duly verified and evaluated within the framework of the law, while forensics is the science and practice that uses scientific methods and technical means to collect and examine evidence, which is subsequently used to establish this legal truth. Forensic science serves as a tool for achieving legal truth, collecting and analyzing factual data, and legal truth is the result of the work of both forensics and other legal procedures. In the context of global digitization, the implementation of information systems in judicial practice in recent years has been considerable, making the transformation of judicial truth in all its dimensions inevitable, and evidence obtained through criminalistics has taken on new characteristics and requires profound changes to the entire system of investigating it.