Suspect Identities A History of ...

Suspect Identities

A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification.

according to Simon A. Cole.

Harvard. $35

Fingerprints

The Origins of Crime Detections and the assassinate Case That Launched Forensic Science.

by the agency of Colin Beavan.

Hyperion

$2295

'Look at that with your magnifying glass, Mr Holmes" says Inspector Lestrade in "The Norwood Builder," a Sherlock Holme story published in 1903

"Ye I am doing so" answers the detective, studying a sanguinary thumbprint by the light of a match.

"You are aware that no sum of two units thumb-marks are alike?"

"I have heard something of the kind."

yet Holmes is being facetious, not many of Conan Doyle's original readers would have been familiar with the notion of fingerprint identification and classification when the story first appeared. At the time, Scotland Yard's fingerprint branch was struggling to establish itself, and the first lucky prosecution of a murder case upon the basis of fingerprint evidence was still pair years away.

Now, nearly 100 years later, pair new books explore the strange bights and whorls of the history of fingerprint identification--or "dactylography," as it was sometimes called. In Fingerprints, Colin Beavan uses a groundbreaking 1905 homicide trial--in which a solitary fingerprint was the simply piece of evidence--as a springboard to a broader history of forensic science.

In Suspect Identities, Simon cabbage examines the "imposing veneer of scientific and legal authority" accorded to fingerprint technology and other forensic sciences, and divest of coverings many disturbing flaws and ambiguities. the two authors weigh the often conflicted part that forensic technologies have played in the evolution of law enforcement, and the couple accounts are enlivened with case histories and sketches of the personalities who charted this strange of the present day territory.

It will surprise many readers to learn that early fingerprint classification a whole s had more to do with establishing identity than with tracking criminals. "Early dactyloscopers did not conceive of fingerprint identification as a forensic technique, for solving crimes through linking criminals to evidence left at crime scenes" writes cabbage "Instead, they viewed fingerprinting as a recordkeeping technology, a way of linking bodies in custody to their criminal records." At a time when the severity of a criminal condemnation was often linked to the number of previous offense the puzzle of establishing identity assumed tremendous importance.

"Where passports do not exist, nothing is easier than to change one's name," noted Alexis de Tocqueville in 1833 "If, therefore, a delivered convict commits a recent crime under a fictitious name, he can to a high degree easily conceal his relapse." flat passports and other identity papers were by means of no means foolproof; their usefulness as tools of identification was limited, in the days before photography, on the descriptive powers of the bureaucrats who issued them. Notations of a "normal" nose or "healthy" complexion did little to assist criminal investigators.

through every part of the 19th century, as population center in America and Britain grew larger and more anonymous, the question of matching criminal records with suspects grew unruffled more pronounced. With criminals shedding identities to avoid prosecution, law enforcement officials became desperate to discover one form of permanent bodily marking that declared a person's individuality. "If it were true" noted united legal scholar, "that every individual had any peculiar mark or designation, natural or imposed, which formerly impressed was adherent and indelible, the possession of that peculiarity through the person in the case and the individual in the evidence would conclusively test them to be the same."

A small arrange of innovators, working in various parts of the world, came to believe that the arches, links and whorls on the tips of one's fingers might shut in the key, forming a image of "biological seal," which, one time impressed, could never be denied. Before their ideas could be enjoin into practice, however, the recently made known technique had to overcome athletic resistance from judges, as well as stiff competition from competing bodys of identification, such as Alphonse Bertillon's involved scheme of bodily measurements.

Colin Beavan frames his account of this fight with details of the horrific 1902 double kill cruelly of an English shopkeeper named Thomas Farrow and his wife. When a murderous print was discovered on Farrow's cash coachman's seat the capture and prosecution of the killers became a judicial referendum forward the validity of fingerprints as a tool of criminal identification. "Only one time before had fingerprint evidence been accepted in a British court," writes Beavan, "and that was just for burglary. This was homicide What jury would be willing to despatch a man to the gallows forward the evidence of a gob of sweat smeared forward a piece of metal?"

It's an appealing premise, especially given that Henry Faulds, a pivotal figure in the emerging science, moveed himself as a witness for the defense believing that the individuality of single fingerprints had not been conclusively proven It is the story of Faulds, rather than the slay of the Farrows, that forms the heart of Beavan's account.