Rating: 
Summary: Putting Their Fingers On It
Review: We are used to fingerprints as forensic evidence these days, but fingerprints have only been accepted for legal identification and detection for less than a century. In the prosecution of a particularly brutal murder in 1905, Scotland Yard introduced fingerprints to the courtroom, after decades of rejecting their use. The history of early fingerprinting makes surprisingly good reading in _Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science_ (Hyperion) by Colin Beavan.The horrid murder serves as introduction to the book, and its resolution by fingerprint is the climax. In between is a fascinating story that involves legal philosophy as well as science and history. For instance, throughout most legal history, the only evidence allowed in court was eyewitness testimony; even now, the words of an eyewitness are thought by the public to be especially weighty, although it has become clear especially in the last decades that memories are malleable and that eyewitness testimony is often worse than useless. Physical evidence was held to be too likely to be manipulated; juries relied on hearing what people remembered seeing with their own eyes rather than what experts said they could deduce by objective methods. Science had wrought the changes of the industrial revolution, but had not touched the judiciary. There was a system that had been invented by a Frenchman, Alphonse Bertillon, consisting of numerous, minute body measurements, such as finger and forearm lengths. This was the competition to fingerprinting, whose advantages were less obvious. A Scotland-born doctor, Henry Faulds, while in Japan as a missionary, noticed that there were finger impressions in ancient pottery, and began to study fingerprints as unique identifiers. It was he who discovered that fingerprints did not change as people aged, and that using sandpaper, razor, or acid to obliterate fingerprints made no difference, as when healed, the prints grew back exactly in the previous manner. Here was an easy way to identify people permanently. But Faulds was robbed of credit for his research, mostly by the brilliant snob Francis Galton. He died in 1930, still not even a footnote in the fingerprint story. This book corrects the oversight. _Fingerprints_ tells a good deal about the scientific infighting for credit for fingerprinting, and the process by which it became a forensic endeavor. It mentions a few modern aspects of the science, such as the new FBI computer that can compare 65 million fingerprint sets, and the new capacity to lift prints from paper or even human skin. Best of all, it uses several crime dramas from the turn of the last century to tell an engrossing story of how fingerprinting, in which no policeman had confidence, started on its way to becoming the most important police identification technique.
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