fingerprinting historical crime case study

The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence

Thomas Jennings used a freshly painted railing to flee a murder scene but unwittingly left behind something that would change detective work forever

Francine Uenuma

History Correspondent

Just after 2 a.m. on the night of September 19, 1910, Clarence Hiller woke to the screams of his wife and daughter in their home at 1837 West 104th Street in Chicago. After a spate of robberies, residents of this South Side neighborhood were already on edge. Hiller, a railroad clerk, raced to confront the intruder. In the ensuing scuffle, the two men fell down the staircase. His daughter, Clarice, later recalled hearing three shots, followed by her mother screaming upstairs. Neighbors came running but the man had fled the home, leaving a dying Hiller by his front door.

The unknown assailant didn’t make it far. Thomas Jennings – an African-American man who had been paroled six weeks earlier - was stopped a half-mile away wearing a torn and bloodied coat and carrying a revolver. But it was what he left behind that would be the focal point of his trial—a fingerprint from a freshly painted railing that he used to hoist himself through a window at the Hiller house. Police photographed and cut off the railing itself, claiming it would prove the identity of the burglar. In the eyes of the court, they were right; Hiller’s murder would lead to the first conviction using fingerprint evidence in a criminal trial in the United States. At times controversial, this method of solving cases endures more than a century later.

Not only has fingerprinting had staying power in the legal system, the underlying method is fundamentally the same as when it was first introduced to American police departments. Prints are still evaluated based on the same descriptions of arches, loops and whorls written by Sir Francis Galton in the late 19th century. Further, the basic technique of collecting and comparing remains remarkably similar to what was applied to that rudimentary set of prints discovered at the Hiller home.

Jennings’ defense attorneys raised questions about this new—and little understood—technique, as well as whether such evidence could even be legally introduced in court (the first time it was used in Britain, they claimed, a special law was needed to make such evidence legal). The defense team even solicited prints from the public in an effort to find a match and disprove the theory that fingerprints were never repeated. A courtroom demonstration, however, backfired badly: Defense attorney W.G Anderson’s print was clearly visible after he challenged experts to lift the impression from a piece of paper that he had touched.

This made a distinct impression on the jury as well; they voted unanimously to convict Jennings, who was sentenced to hang. The Decatur Herald called it “the first conviction on finger-printing evidence in the history of this country,” adding with dramatic flourish that “the murderer of Hiller wrote his signature when he rested his hand upon the freshly painted railing at the Hiller home.”

It’s unclear the degree to which Jennings’s race played a part in his trial. News reports at the time didn’t sensationalize race in their coverage, or even mention Hiller’s race. Yet it’s not hard to envision that a jury, presented with an unfamiliar technique, would have been more skeptical with a white defendant.

The concept of identifying people by unique fingerprints, first laid out 18 years earlier in Europe, even had its origin in pseudoscientific racial beliefs. It was thoroughly studied and chronicled in Galton’s 1892 epic tome Finger Prints (A cousin of Darwin, Galton had long focused on a series of experiments hoping to tie myriad personal and intellectual characteristics to physical traits and heredity). Galton, who had also studied anthropometry in an effort to deduce the meaning behind physical measurements, did not find any major difference between races in his exhaustive collection of prints for research—but not for lack of effort. He wrote in Finger Prints that “it seemed reasonable to expect to find racial differences in finger marks, the inquiries were continued in varied ways until hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable.”

As journalist Ava Kofman recently outlined in the Public Domain Review , Galton’s pursuit of fingerprint science meshed well with colonialist ideology of the time. “Fingerprints were originally introduced for Europeans to distinguish between the otherwise indistinguishable mass of extra-European peoples, who themselves produced “indecipherable” fingerprints,” she wrote. Later in his career, according to Kofman, Galton would later engage in quantifying racial differences, inventing “scientific,” numerical measurements to categorize humans by race.

Nonetheless the system Galton outlined was to identify unique characteristics proved effective and caught on quickly. Police in the United States were just beginning to emulate their European colleagues and started to gather prints for the purpose of identification in the early 20th century. During the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Scotland Yard sent representatives to host an exhibit to demonstrate the technique, which was growing in popularity in British courts. Even Mark Twain was caught up in the speculation of how they could be used to apprehend criminals, placing “the assassin’s natal autograph” – which is to say the “blood-stained finger-prints” found on a knife- at the center of the dramatic courtroom finale in his novel Puddn’head Wilson , published years before the Jennings case.

After Jennings’ conviction, however, lawyers mounted a challenge to the notion that such a newfangled and little-understood technique could be admitted in court. After more than a year in the appeals process, on December 21, 1911, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction in the People v. Jennings , affirming his sentence would be carried out soon after. They cited prior cases in Britain and published studies on the subject to lend credibility to fingerprinting. Several witnesses in the Jennings trial, it pointed out, had been trained by the venerable Scotland Yard. “This method of identification is in such general and common use that the courts cannot refuse to take judicial cognizance of it,” the ruling stated.

Fingerprinting had thereby been “proclaimed by the Supreme Court of Illinois to be sufficient basis for a verdict of death by hanging,” the Chicago Tribune reported, and it was the beginning of a shift toward the largely unquestioned use of fingerprint evidence in courtrooms across the United States. “The Jennings case really is the earliest case – earliest published case – in which you’ll find any discussion of fingerprint evidence,” says Simon A. Cole, author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification and professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology. “So, in that sense it really is a precedent for the whole country.”

People v. Jennings further specified that fingerprint evidence was something that the average juror would have to rely on interpretation to understand. “Expert testimony is admissible when the subject matter of the inquiry is of such a character that only persons of skill and experience are capable of forming a correct judgment as to any facts connected therewith.” The inclusion of this statement was crucial in legal terms: some level of human judgment and interpretation was a given, built into the courtroom process when fingerprint evidence was presented to a jury. The degree of subjectivity that represents and what potential room for error - however small – is acceptable is still actively debated more than a century later.

Beginning with the Jennings trial, two fundamental questions have formed the basis of any challenge to its admissibility in court. Is the technique itself sound (the primary issue when it was first introduced)? And how accurate the evidence is when interpreted and applied to any specific case? “The uniqueness of fingerprints is really kind of beside the point of the accuracy of the identification,” says Cole. “The best way to understand that is to think about eyewitness identification – nobody disputes that all human faces are in some sense unique, even those of identical twins, but nobody reasons from that that eyewitness identification must be 100 percent accurate.” Juries like the one that convicted Jennings were initially focused on whether prints were repeated, “whereas really what we need to know is can people match them accurately.”

It is this gray area that defense attorneys seize on in thorny legal cases. Following a 1993 Supreme Court ruling in Daubert vs. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., judges were required to apply what is known as the Daubert standard to determine if a witness’ testimony can be considered scientific. This is based on a list of factors, including how the technique itself has been tested, error rates and what regulations govern its usage. These standards were more stringent than what had previously been required, putting the onus on judges to determine what could be considered by a jury as scientific evidence.

Fingerprinting techniques came under marked public scrutiny in 2004 when an Oregon lawyer named Brandon Mayfield was arrested in connection with a terrorist attack on a commuter train in Madrid based on a mistaken match of a partial print gathered at the scene . The FBI later publicly apologized to Mayfield, but such high-profile incidents inevitably introduce questions about if other mistakes have gone unnoticed and fuel skeptics and lawyers who contest the often presumed infallibility of such evidence.

As part of a broader re-examination of forensics that had come to be widely accepted over the years, the National Academy of Sciences released a report in 2009 that addressed some of these shortcomings, acknowledging that “not all fingerprint evidence is equally good, because the true value of the evidence is determined by the quality of the latent fingerprint image. These disparities between and within the forensic science disciplines highlight a major problem in the forensic science community: The simple reality is that the interpretation of forensic evidence is not always based on scientific studies to determine its validity.”

Fingerprint examiners rely on years of experience, testing and verification by a second examiner to bolster the reliability of their determination. Echoing the reasoning in the People v. Jennings ruling, fingerprint examiner William Leo writes that “the purpose of the expert witness in the legal system is to interpret information and form a conclusion that a jury of lay persons would be incapable of doing…A fingerprint examiner’s conclusion is not based upon a personal opinion, but rather on an evaluation of the detail present using the knowledge and skills acquired through training, education and expertise.”

“You’ll probably find for the most part that most people are in agreement that most of the time if you have a decent print of some size that is of decent quality, you can make an identification in some reasonable percentage of cases,” says David A. Harris, professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science . “Where things have begun to come into question in the last 20 years is the way that those identifications have been done, the certainty with which they have been presented, the terminology around that and just a general harder look at all the forensic sciences.”

When it comes to fingerprint evidence, uncertainty has not been eliminated, but is now more likely to be acknowledged and addressed. And despite greater skepticism in recent decades and the more stringent caveats introduced by Daubert, courts have not significantly curtailed the use of fingerprint evidence, nor the reliance on examiners to interpret this evidence for the jury.

“A hundred years is kind of an impressive run,” says Cole. “There are some reasons for that – I think the fingerprint patterns are very information rich, you can see that there’s a lot of information packed into a small area.” When Thomas Jennings placed his hand on a porch railing in the middle of the night, he unwittingly introduced that valuable information into American courtrooms, influencing the outcome of innumerable cases for more than a century and counting.

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The Will and William West case: The identical inmates that showed the need for fingerprinting, 1903

Will West and William West mugshots.

On May 1, 1903, an African-American man named Will West entered the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth. Like any other new prisoner, West was subjected to the standard admission procedure: prison clerks took photographs, a physical description, and eleven anthropometric measurements.

Using West’s measurements and description, identification clerks matched him to the record of William West, who had a previous conviction for murder. Not surprisingly, in the clerks’ view, West denied that he was this man.

The discovery of Will West’s past conviction must have seemed routine to the Leavenworth clerks: once again, the world-famous Bertillon system of identification had prevented a criminal from escaping his past. Once again, science had exposed a criminal’s lies and evasions.

This incident suddenly deviated from the usual, however, when the clerks discovered to their amazement that this same William West was already incarcerated at Leavenworth!

According to authors Harris Hawthorne Wilder and Bert Wentworth (1918): “From the Bertillon measurements thus obtained, [the record keeper] went to the file, and returned with the card the measurements called for, properly filled out…and bearing the name, “William West.” This card was shown to the prisoner, who grinned in amazement, and said,

“That’s my picture, but I don’t know where you got it, for I know I have never been here before.” The record clerk turned the card over, and read the particulars there given, including the statements that this man was already a prisoner at the same institution, having been committed to a life sentence on September 9, 1901, for the crime of murder.

This doppelgängers case sparked the need for fingerprinting.

The second West was summoned, and he looked startlingly like the first one. Subsequently, the fingerprints of Will West and William West were compared. The patterns bore no resemblance.

The fallibility of three systems of personal identification (photographs, Bertillon measurements, and names) was demonstrated by this one case. The value of fingerprints as means of identification was established.

The warden, R. W. McClaughry, according to the legend, declared, “This is the death of Bertillonage!” and discontinued anthropometry as Leavenworth “the very next day.”

After the Will West-William West case, most police departments began using photographs, Bertillon measurements, and fingerprints on their mugshot files. Eventually, the Bertillon system was discarded.

The William and Will West story is somewhat sensationalized and omits prison record information, uncovered by later researchers, indicating that William and Will West both corresponded with the same family members and thus were probably related.

Prison records also cite that Leavenworth inmate George Bean reported that he knew William and Will West in their home territory before prison and that they were twin brothers.

Their exact relationship is still unknown. What is factual is that the two West men were not unusual; many people have similar anthropometric measurements.

It is generally accepted that identical twins will have the same or almost the same anthropometric measurements, yet easily differentiated fingerprints. The superiority of fingerprints over anthropometry is thus clear.

Will and William West mugshots and fingerprints.

Regardless of how crucial the incident was to the adoption of fingerprinting, the men’s prison records—including their almost identical mug shots, matching Bertillon measurements, and mismatched fingerprints—survive to authenticate an amazing coincidence.

Will West, the newer of the two Leavenworth inmates, served his manslaughter sentence and left no trail after his release, thus disappearing from history.

William West, the lifer, spent time in solitary confinement for fighting and creating disturbances during his early years behind bars. He was released on parole in 1919, but not before making a dash for freedom.

By 1916 West was a model prisoner and a “trusty,” an inmate entrusted to guard and discipline other prisoners on work details. One afternoon he “succumbed to the temptation,” as he put it, and walked away. He hopped a freight train and made it as far as Topeka before he was arrested the next day and returned to Leavenworth.

The police officers who picked him up did not need fingerprints to confirm he was an escapee. A prison-issued circular bearing his mug shots and a written description had already reached Topeka. Ironically, they were enough to nab a man who had helped to modernize the identification of criminals.

Nowadays, fingerprinting remains critical for identification in the criminal justice system, useful for identifying records and maintaining criminal history.

(Photo credit: Suspect Identities. A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification / Police Photography By Larry S. Miller, Norman Marin, Richard T. McEvoy Jr / The Two Will Wests By Dean Jobb).

Updated on: November 28, 2021

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The Stratton Brothers: The First UK Murder Conviction Based on Fingerprint Evidence

Explore the historic Farrow Murders and the groundbreaking use of fingerprint evidence that led to the conviction of the Stratton Brothers in the United Kingdom. Learn about the crime scene, the mysterious fingerprint, and...

Introduction

The Farrow Murders, involving the notorious Stratton Brothers, marked a significant milestone in the history of forensic science in the United Kingdom. This case became the first instance where fingerprint evidence led to a conviction for murder. The story of Alfred and Albert Stratton unfolds with a brutal crime scene, a puzzling fingerprint, and the groundbreaking use of forensic identification. This article delves into the details of the case, highlighting the role of fingerprint evidence and its impact on the criminal justice system.

The Discovery of the Crime Scene

On the morning of March 27, 1905, in Deptford, a suburb of London, a 16-year-old boy named William Jones visited the paint shop owned by Thomas Farrow, 71, and his wife Ann, 65. To his surprise, the shop was closed at an unusual hour. Concerned, Jones knocked on the door multiple times but received no response. He peered through the window and witnessed a disarray of knocked-over chairs, prompting him to seek help. Jones approached a local resident named Louis Kidman, and together, they decided to enter the shop through the rear entrance.

Inside the shop, a horrifying sight awaited them. They discovered the lifeless body of Mr. Farrow lying in a pool of blood while Mrs. Farrow was unconscious but still alive. Mrs. Farrow was immediately rushed to the hospital, but sadly, she succumbed to her injuries a few days later. The absence of forced entry suggested a possible burglary, as an empty cash box was discovered on the floor of the disheveled flat.

The Investigation and the Mysterious Fingerprint

During the crime scene investigation, the police discovered two black masks made from stockings. Speculations arose that the assailants had knocked on the door during the night or early morning, attacked Mr. Farrow upon opening the door, and proceeded to assault his wife in the bedroom. As the detectives examined the cash box, they made a crucial discovery—a greasy fingerprint on the inside surface.

The fingerprint was carefully collected and sent to Scotland Yard’s Fingerprinting Bureau under the supervision of Detective Inspector Charles Collins. Upon close examination, Collins determined that the print most likely belonged to an individual’s thumb. The print was compared to the fingerprints Fingerprint, impression made by the papillary ridges on the ends of the fingers and thumbs. Fingerprints afford an infallible means of personal identification, because the ridge arrangement on every finger of every human being is unique... of the victims, the officers present at the crime scene, and the extensive collection of over 80,000 sets of prints maintained by the Bureau. Surprisingly, no match was found among the existing records.

Pursuing the Suspects: Alfred and Albert Stratton

With the trail of fingerprint evidence growing cold, the investigators turned their attention to potential witnesses. Fortunately, several individuals claimed to have seen two men leaving the Farrows’ shop in the early morning hours of the murder. One witness even managed to identify one of the men as Alfred Stratton. The Stratton brothers, Alfred and Albert, were not previously known for criminal activities but had a reputation within certain circles.

Witness descriptions aligned with the appearances of the two brothers and Alfred’s girlfriend provided additional evidence. She informed the police that Alfred had discarded a set of clothes matching the description given by the witnesses. Strikingly, he had also requested a pair of stockings from her. Albert’s girlfriend was also interviewed and confessed that Albert had returned home on the morning of the crime with unexplained money.

The Power of Fingerprint Evidence: Alfred’s Conviction

The Stratton brothers were subsequently arrested, and their fingerprints were taken. When the collected prints were compared to the thumbprint found on the cash box, Alfred’s print established a clear match. The evidence seemed strong, but the defense team mounted a vigorous effort to prove the brothers’ innocence. They brought in Dr. John Garson, who was considered an expert in the field. However, it was later revealed that Garson had been in contact with both the prosecution and the defense, compromising his credibility as an expert witness.

During the trial, the prosecution presented over 40 witnesses to solidify their case against the Stratton brothers. However, despite their efforts and the success of fingerprinting in previous cases like that of Harry Jackson, the technique was still met with skepticism from the public and the jury. Fingerprint evidence remained the sole tangible link between the brothers and the crime scene. Detective Inspector Collins took the stand as an expert witness, explaining the working principles of fingerprinting. He emphasized that among the 800,000+ individual digit impressions held by Scotland Yard, he had never encountered two different impressions that appeared the same. To support his testimony, Collins presented enlarged images of the thumbprints, highlighting the points of similarity.

The Verdict and Legacy

The compelling testimony of Detective Inspector Collins and the undeniable match of Alfred Stratton’s fingerprint persuaded the jury. In May 1905, the two brothers were convicted of murder and subsequently hanged. This landmark case marked a significant turning point in the acceptance and utilization of fingerprint evidence within the criminal justice system of the United Kingdom.

The successful conviction of the Stratton Brothers laid the foundation for the widespread adoption of fingerprint identification as a reliable forensic tool. The case showcased the power of fingerprints in linking suspects to crime scenes, influencing future investigations, and shaping the development of forensic science.

The Farrow Murders and the subsequent conviction of the Stratton Brothers represented a groundbreaking moment in the history of forensic science. This case marked the first murder conviction in the United Kingdom based on fingerprint evidence, highlighting the importance of this identification technique. The investigation’s reliance on fingerprinting showcased the potential of forensic science to solve complex crimes and bring criminals to justice.

As fingerprinting gained credibility and widespread acceptance, it revolutionized criminal investigations worldwide. Today, fingerprint evidence continues to be a vital tool in forensic science, providing valuable insights into the identification and conviction of perpetrators. The Stratton Brothers’ case serves as a reminder of the pivotal role that forensic techniques play in unraveling mysteries and upholding justice.

Forensic Analyst by Profession. With Simplyforensic.com striving to provide a one-stop-all-in-one platform with accessible, reliable, and media-rich content related to forensic science. Education background in B.Sc.Biotechnology and Master of Science in forensic science.

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The First Criminal Conviction Based on Fingerprint Evidence

How a 1910 murder in chicago became precedent for the inclusion of fingerprint evidence in u.s. courts..

In the early morning hours of Sept. 19, 1910, Mary Hiller awoke inside the Chicago home she shared with her husband and four children. The gas light at the head of their stairway, which she always left running overnight, was out — so she sent her husband to investigate.

Upon inspection, Clarence Hiller found an intruder: a recently paroled man named Thomas Jennings. The two struggled briefly before several gunshots rang out, leaving Hiller dead. Prior to this fatal encounter, Jennings had sexually assaulted one of Hiller’s daughters.

Jennings fled, but police detained him less than a mile from the crime scene. He was bloodied, with torn clothing and a recently fired .38 revolver. His explanation for his ragged appearance — of having fallen from a trolley — wasn’t convincing enough for police, who arrested him.

But it wasn’t just this evidence or eyewitness testimony that ultimately sentenced Jennings to death for murder. It was also the fingerprints he left on a freshly painted handrail.

Read More: Top 5 Pieces of Forensic Evidence Used to Solve a Crime

When Did Fingerprinting Start?

Human fingerprinting goes back thousands of years , but the first modern use of it for identification likely originated in colonial India. Around 1860, Sir William James Herschel , a British Indian Civil Service officer, began experimenting with finger- and handprints as a way to sign contracts.

Henry Faulds , a Scottish medical missionary in Japan in the 1870s and 80s, also became fascinated by fingerprints; more specifically, he wondered how they might be applied forensically. His first public musing on it was published in Nature in 1880.

Faulds shared his ideas in writing with Charles Darwin, who in turn passed them to his relative, anthropologist Sir Francis Galton. It was Galton who eventually published three books about such fingerprint concepts, including his 1892 Finger Prints .

Though Galton is also infamously known for his theories on eugenics, he helped create the basic system of fingerprint ridge patterns — called arches, loops and whorls — we still use to uniquely ID someone today.

This system later became the standard for Sir Edward Henry, chief commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police. After the Galton-Henry system of fingerprint classification was published in 1900, it Scotland Yard officially adopted it in 1901 for criminal records.

Less than a decade later, Jennings left four fingerprints on a recently painted back porch railing outside the Hiller home. Using the railing to hoist himself up, he then entered through the kitchen window.

Read More: Why Do We Have Fingerprints?

When Were Fingerprints First Used As Forensic Evidence?

The morning after the murder, police investigators removed the railing and made enlarged photographs of the prints. They compared those images to two other enlarged fingerprint sets — one from Jennings’ arrest and another taken months earlier, following a parole violation that had sent him back to prison.

By the time of the November 1910 trial, fingerprints already enjoyed wide usage in the U.S. for criminal records and identifying federal prison inmates. But their use in courtrooms, specifically for murder cases, wasn’t nearly as prominent.

During Jennings’ trial, prosecutors used expert testimony from four people skilled in fingerprinting: Michael P. Evans, head of the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Investigation; William M. Evans, a former bureau member; Edward Foster, a Canadian police inspector; and Mary Holland, the first female fingerprinting instructor.

The four witnesses had personally studied and made thousands of fingerprint sets, and enlightened the courtroom to the basics of how the system worked. Each expert also confirmed that the multiple print sets in the trial were all left by the defendant.

Other evidence didn’t help his case. Jennings’ statements on his injuries and whereabouts were inconsistent with testimony from other witnesses. Bullets from the crime scene were the same as the ones in his revolver. Even the dirt from his shoes matched the dirt left on the Hiller daughter’s bed.

Fingerprint Analysis: Guilty

On Nov. 10, 1910, a jury delivered a unanimous guilty verdict, with only one person declining a death sentence. By the third ballot, however, this too was unanimous.

Jennings’ lawyers appealed — objecting both to the admissibility of the fingerprints and that fingerprint examiners were considered expert witnesses. The case reached the Illinois Supreme Court in 1911, but there the conviction was upheld: Fingerprinting was a science, and expert testimony on it was deemed acceptable in a trial.

A habeas corpus petition, arguing that police violated Jennings’ rights when they made him provide fingerprints, was denied in a U.S. District Court and on Feb. 16, 1912, Jennings was hanged.

He is considered the first criminal in U.S. history to be convicted based on fingerprint evidence. In the decades that followed, courts sided the ruling in People v. Jennings as a precedent for the inclusion of fingerprint evidence.

And though it has not proved universally sound over the last century, fingerprinting remains an enduring piece of forensic criminal investigation alongside more modern techniques.

Read More: Taking a Closer Look at Forensic Science Behind U.S. Criminal Justice

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This Day In History : May 5

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British murder trial begins, the first to be solved by fingerprint evidence

Trial starts in the murder case of Thomas and Ann Farrow, shopkeepers in South London. The case would be the first resolved on the basis of fingerprint evidence.

The neighbors had found the Farrows in their home, badly bludgeoned, on March 27 of that year. Thomas was already dead, but Ann was still breathing. She died four days later without ever having regained consciousness.

Only three years earlier, the first English court had admitted fingerprint evidence in a petty theft case. But the Farrow case was the first time that the cutting-edge technology was used to prosecute a high-profile murder case.

Since the cash box in which the Farrow’s stored their cash receipts was empty, it was clear to Scotland Yard investigators that robbery was the motive for the crime. One print on the box did not match the victims or any of the still-tiny files of criminal prints that Scotland Yard possessed. Fortunately, a local milkman reported seeing two young men in the vicinity of the Farrow house on the day of the murders. Soon identified as brothers Alfred and Albert Stratton, the police began interviewing their friends.

Alfred’s girlfriend told police he had given away his coat that day and changed the color of his shoes the day after the murders. A week later, authorities finally caught up with the Stratton brothers and fingerprinted them. Alfred’s right thumb was a perfect match for the print on the Farrow’s cash box.

The fingerprint evidence became the prosecution’s only solid evidence when the milkman was unable to positively identify the Strattons. The defense put up expert Dr. John Garson to attack the reliability of the fingerprint evidence. But the prosecution countered with evidence that Garson had written to both the defense and prosecution on the same day offering his services to both.

The Stratton brothers, obviously not helped by the discrediting of Garson, were convicted and hanged on May 23, 1905. Since then, fingerprint evidence has become commonplace in criminal trials and the lack of it is even used by defense attorneys.

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Fingerprints and Crime

The first criminal conviction based on fingerprint evidence took place in Argentina on 1892, thanks to a police official inspired by eugenics.

The first criminal conviction based on fingerprint evidence took place in 1892. This was in Argentina a decade before such uses of fingerprints and convictions occurred in the UK and France. It wasn’t until 1912 that the U.S. had its first fingerprint-based conviction.

So why Argentina? Juan Vucetich, an immigrant from Croatia, joined Argentina’s provincial police Office of Identification and set up that country’s fingerprint files in 1891. A student of Galton’s system, Vucetich called fingerprinting dactyloscopy ( dactiloscopia in Spanish). Galton was a eugenicist and thought, incorrectly, that fingerprints could trace heredity. Vucetich thought of fingerprints as an identification system for individuals, specifically those populations in presumed need of control, like criminals, prostitutes, and, ironically, immigrants.

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As historian Julia Rodriguez puts it, the genius of Vucetich’s system was “the efficiency with which his classification system could be married to an emerging bureaucratic archive of individual fingerprints .”

One of the policemen Vucetich trained was Eduardo Alvarez. Alvarez was called to help in the aftermath of a sensational crime in the village of Necochea in June 1892. Two children had been stabbed to death in their beds. Their mother’s throat had been sliced. The mother, Francisca (sometimes Francesca) Rojas, survived and accused her neighbor.

This neighbor turned out to have a very good alibi, however, and the case was stalled until Alvarez came on the scene. He found a single bloody fingerprint on a door and brought that section of the door back to Vucetich in Buenos Aires. It happened to match the prints taken from Francisca Rojas. Rojas confessed when confronted with the evidence. She had slit her own throat to cover up her crime.

An open and shut case, as they say. “The spark that Vucetich started and that took flame in Argentina flickered and wavered in other contexts, but it eventually joined with parallel efforts to become a universal practice,” writes Rodriquez.

Fingerprints, after all, don’t change over a lifetime, are very hard to manipulate, and are…. close to unique. (In the late nineteenth century, the polymath Sir Francis Galton estimated that the chances of two people sharing fingerprints was 1 in 64 billion.) Nonetheless, it took some time for conservative legal systems to accept the process. Today, fingerprint is standard operating procedure for criminal cases.

However, latent fingerprint evidence isn’t as infallible as crime entertainment might suggest. Latent fingerprint examiners, after all, are human beings, too, subject to the same biases as everyone else. Their job is both to identify and then explain similarities and differences between latent prints, which may be partial or unclear, and prints on file (which presumably are made in perfect conditions), to juries. In other words, they are supposed to guide the jury to a conclusion.

This method has had many critics over the years. An American Association for the Advancement of Science study published last year found that “ fingerprint source identity lacks scientific basis for legal certainty .” This followed earlier studies by the National Research Council, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which all cast doubt on the notion that fingerprinting is 100% accurate. The AAAS report noted that the innocent have been convicted on the basis of incorrect fingerprint matches. The proof, it turns out, may not always be in the print.

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Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case That Launched Forensic Science

Written by Colin Beavan Review by Trudi E. Jacobson

This is a fascinating look into the history and use of fingerprints in crime detection. Beavan begins the book by recounting a terrible double murder in Deptford, just outside London, in 1905. The owner of Chapman’s Oil and Colour Shop, Thomas Farrow, and his wife Ann have been brutally attacked by blows to their heads. Their cash box is open and empty, and one clear fingerprint has been found on it. From this point, Beavan backs up and very briefly explains what had constituted “evidence,” starting with medieval France and continuing up to the 1800s, though this term itself was not used until the time of Henry VII. The bulk of the book looks at the key players who explored and used fingerprinting for a variety of uses–as a more secure form of a signature, to try to discover a “biological coat of arms” by a man interested in eugenics, and of course as a forensic tool–and the progress fingerprinting made in apprehending criminals and as acceptable evidence in courts of law. The action primarily takes place in India and England, with forays into France (where an earlier identification system, anthropometric measurements, was used), the United States, and Argentina. This book will appeal to historical mystery readers, who will gain an excellent understanding of the trials and tribulations proponents of fingerprinting underwent in getting the method accepted. It should also appeal to all readers who enjoy a well-written, absorbing tale.

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DNA fingerprinting in forensics: past, present, future

Lutz roewer.

1 Department of Forensic Genetics, Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

DNA fingerprinting, one of the great discoveries of the late 20th century, has revolutionized forensic investigations. This review briefly recapitulates 30 years of progress in forensic DNA analysis which helps to convict criminals, exonerate the wrongly accused, and identify victims of crime, disasters, and war. Current standard methods based on short tandem repeats (STRs) as well as lineage markers (Y chromosome, mitochondrial DNA) are covered and applications are illustrated by casework examples. Benefits and risks of expanding forensic DNA databases are discussed and we ask what the future holds for forensic DNA fingerprinting.

The past - a new method that changed the forensic world

'“I’ve found it! I’ve found it”, he shouted, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hemoglobin, and by nothing else”,’ says Sherlock Holmes to Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle’s first novel A study in Scarlet from1886 and later: 'Now we have the Sherlock Holmes’ test, and there will no longer be any difficulty […]. Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes’ [ 1 ].

The Eureka shout shook England again and was heard around the world when roughly 100 years later Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, in UK, found extraordinarily variable and heritable patterns from repetitive DNA analyzed with multi-locus probes. Not being Holmes he refrained to call the method after himself but 'DNA fingerprinting’ [ 2 ]. Under this name his invention opened up a new area of science. The technique proved applicable in many biological disciplines, namely in diversity and conservation studies among species, and in clinical and anthropological studies. But the true political and social dimension of genetic fingerprinting became apparent far beyond academic circles when the first applications in civil and criminal cases were published. Forensic genetic fingerprinting can be defined as the comparison of the DNA in a person’s nucleated cells with that identified in biological matter found at the scene of a crime or with the DNA of another person for the purpose of identification or exclusion. The application of these techniques introduces new factual evidence to criminal investigations and court cases. However, the first case (March 1985) was not strictly a forensic case but one of immigration [ 3 ]. The first application of DNA fingerprinting saved a young boy from deportation and the method thus captured the public’s sympathy. In Alec Jeffreys’ words: 'If our first case had been forensic I believe it would have been challenged and the process may well have been damaged in the courts’ [ 4 ]. The forensic implications of genetic fingerprinting were nevertheless obvious, and improvements of the laboratory process led already in 1987 to the very first application in a forensic case. Two teenage girls had been raped and murdered on different occasions in nearby English villages, one in 1983, and the other in 1986. Semen was obtained from each of the two crime scenes. The case was spectacular because it surprisingly excluded a suspected man, Richard Buckland, and matched another man, Colin Pitchfork, who attempted to evade the DNA dragnet by persuading a friend to give a sample on his behalf. Pitchfork confessed to committing the crimes after he was confronted with the evidence that his DNA profile matched the trace DNA from the two crime scenes. For 2 years the Lister Institute of Leicester where Jeffreys was employed was the only laboratory in the world doing this work. But it was around 1987 when companies such as Cellmark, the academic medico-legal institutions around the world, the national police, law enforcement agencies, and so on started to evaluate, improve upon, and employ the new tool. The years after the discovery of DNA fingerprinting were characterized by a mood of cooperation and interdisciplinary research. None of the many young researchers who has been there will ever forget the DNA fingerprint congresses which were held on five continents, in Bern (1990), in Belo Horizonte (1992), in Hyderabad (1994), in Melbourne (1996), and in Pt. Elizabeth (1999), and then shut down with the good feeling that the job was done. Everyone read the Fingerprint News distributed for free by the University of Cambridge since 1989 (Figure  1 ). This affectionate little periodical published non-stylish short articles directly from the bench without impact factors and resumed networking activities in the different fields of applications. The period in the 1990s was the golden research age of DNA fingerprinting succeeded by two decades of engineering, implementation, and high-throughput application. From the Foreword of Alec Jeffreys in Fingerprint News , Issue 1, January 1989: 'Dear Colleagues, […] I hope that Fingerprint News will cover all aspects of hypervariable DNA and its application, including both multi-locus and single-locus systems, new methods for studying DNA polymorphisms, the population genetics of variable loci and the statistical analysis of fingerprint data, as well as providing useful technical tips for getting good DNA profiles […]. May your bands be variable’ [ 5 ].

Cover of one of the first issues of Fingerprint News from 1990.

Jeffreys’ original technology, now obsolete for forensic use, underwent important developments in terms of the basic methodology, that is, from Southern blot to PCR, from radioactive to fluorescent labels, from slab gels to capillary electrophoresis. As the technique became more sensitive, the handling simple and automated and the statistical treatment straightforward, DNA profiling, as the method was renamed, entered the forensic routine laboratories around the world in storm. But, what counts in the Pitchfork case and what still counts today is the process to get DNA identification results accepted in legal proceedings. Spectacular fallacies, from the historical 1989 case of People vs. Castro in New York [ 6 ] to the case against Knox and Sollecito in Italy (2007–2013) where literally DNA fingerprinting was on trial [ 7 ], disclosed severe insufficiencies in the technical protocols and especially in the DNA evidence interpretation and raised nolens volens doubts on the scientific and evidentiary value of forensic DNA fingerprinting. These cases are rare but frequent enough to remind each new generation of forensic analysts, researchers, or private sector employees that DNA evidence is nowadays an important part of factual evidence and needs thus intense scrutiny for all parts of the DNA analysis and interpretation process.

In the following I will briefly describe the development of DNA fingerprinting to a standardized investigative method for court use which has since 1984 led to the conviction of thousands of criminals and to the exoneration of many wrongfully suspected or convicted individuals [ 8 ]. Genetic fingerprinting per se could of course not reduce the criminal rate in any of the many countries in the world, which employ this method. But DNA profiling adds hard scientific value to the evidence and strengthens thus (principally) the credibility of the legal system.

The technological evolution of forensic DNA profiling

In the classical DNA fingerprinting method radio-labeled DNA probes containing minisatellite [ 9 ] or oligonucleotide sequences [ 10 ] are hybridized to DNA that has been digested with a restriction enzyme, separated by agarose electrophoresis and immobilized on a membrane by Southern blotting or - in the case of the oligonucleotide probes - immobilized directly in the dried gel. The radio-labeled probe hybridizes to a set of minisatellites or oligonucleotide stretches in genomic DNA contained in restriction fragments whose size differ because of variation in the numbers of repeat units. After washing away excess probe the exposure to X-ray film (autoradiography) allows these variable fragments to be visualized, and their profiles compared between individuals. Minisatellite probes, called 33.6 and 33.15, were most widely used in the UK, most parts of Europe and the USA, whereas pentameric (CAC)/(GTG) 5 probes were predominantly applied in Germany. These so-called multilocus probes (MLP) detect sets of 15 to 20 variable fragments per individual ranging from 3.5 to 20 kb in size (Figure  2 ). But the multi-locus profiling method had several limitations despite its successful application to crime and kinship cases until the middle of the 1990s. Running conditions or DNA quality issues render the exact matching between bands often difficult. To overcome this, forensic laboratories adhered to binning approaches [ 11 ], where fixed or floating bins were defined relative to the observed DNA fragment size, and adjusted to the resolving power of the detection system. Second, fragment association within one DNA fingerprint profile is not known, leading to statistical errors due to possible linkage between loci. Third, for obtaining optimal profiles the method required substantial amounts of high molecular weight DNA [ 12 ] and thus excludes the majority of crime-scene samples from the analysis. To overcome some of these limitations, single-locus profiling was developed [ 13 ]. Here a single hypervariable locus is detected by a specific single-locus probe (SLP) using high stringency hybridization. Typically, four SLPs were used in a reprobing approach, yielding eight alleles of four independent loci per individual. This method requires only 10 ng of genomic DNA [ 14 ] and has been validated through extensive experiments and forensic casework, and for many years provided a robust and valuable system for individual identification. Nevertheless, all these different restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP)-based methods were still limited by the available quality and quantity of the DNA and also hampered by difficulties to reliably compare genetic profiles from different sources, labs, and techniques. What was needed was a DNA code, which could ideally be generated even from a single nucleated cell and from highly degraded DNA, a code, which could be rapidly generated, numerically encrypted, automatically compared, and easily supported in court. Indeed, starting in the early 1990s DNA fingerprinting methods based on RFLP analysis were gradually supplanted by methods based on PCR because of the improved sensitivity, speed, and genotyping precision [ 15 ]. Microsatellites, in the forensic community usually referred to short tandem repeats (STRs), were found to be ideally suited for forensic applications. STR typing is more sensitive than single-locus RFLP methods, less prone to allelic dropout than VNTR (variable number of tandem repeat) systems [ 16 ], and more discriminating than other PCR-based typing methods, such as HLA-DQA1 [ 17 ]. More than 2,000 publications now detail the technology, hundreds of different population groups have been studied, new technologies as, for example, the miniSTRs [ 18 ] have been developed and standard protocols have been validated in laboratories worldwide (for an overview see [ 19 ]). Forensic DNA profiling is currently performed using a panel of multi-allelic STR markers which are structurally analogous to the original minisatellites but with much shorter repeat tracts and thus easier to amplify and multiplex with PCR. Up to 30 STRs can be detected in a single capillary electrophoresis injection generating for each individual a unique genetic code. Basically there are two sets of STR markers complying with the standards requested by criminal databases around the world: the European standard set of 12 STR markers [ 20 ] and the US CODIS standard of 13 markers [ 21 ]. Due to partial overlap, they form together a standard of 18 STR markers in total. The incorporation of these STR markers into commercial kits has improved the application of these markers for all kinds of DNA evidence with reproducible results from as less than three nucleated cells [ 22 ] and extracted even from severely compromised material. The probability that two individuals will have identical markers at each of 13 different STR loci within their DNA exceeds one out of a billion. If a DNA match occurs between an accused individual and a crime scene stain, the correct courtroom expression would be that the probability of a match if the crime-scene sample came from someone other than the suspect (considering the random, not closely-related man) is at most one in a billion [ 14 ]. The uniqueness of each person’s DNA (with the exception of monozygotic twins) and its simple numerical codification led to the establishment of government-controlled criminal investigation DNA databases in the developed nations around the world, the first in 1995 in the UK [ 23 ]. When a match is made from such a DNA database to link a crime scene sample to an offender who has provided a DNA sample to a database that link is often referred to as a cold hit. A cold hit is of value as an investigative lead for the police agency to a specific suspect. China (approximately 16 million profiles, the United States (approximately 10 million profiles), and the UK (approximately 6 million profiles) maintain the largest DNA database in the world. The percentage of databased persons is on the increase in all countries with a national DNA database, but the proportions are not the same by the far: whereas in the UK about 10% of the population is in the national DNA database, the percentage in Germany and the Netherlands is only about 0.9% and 0.8%, respectively [ 24 ].

Multilocus DNA Fingerprint from a large family probed with the oligonucleotide (GTG) 5 ( Courtesy of Peter Nürnberg, Cologne Center for Genomics, Germany ).

Lineage markers in forensic analysis

Lineage markers have special applications in forensic genetics. Y chromosome analysis is very helpful in cases where there is an excess of DNA from a female victim and only a low proportion from a male perpetrator. Typical examples include sexual assault without ejaculation, sexual assault by a vasectomized male, male DNA under the fingernails of a victim, male 'touch’ DNA on the skin, and the clothing or belongings of a female victim. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is of importance for the analyses of low level nuclear DNA samples, namely from unidentified (typically skeletonized) remains, hair shafts without roots, or very old specimens where only heavily degraded DNA is available [ 25 ]. The unusual non-recombinant mode of inheritance of Y and mtDNA weakens the statistical weight of a match between individual samples but makes the method efficient for the reconstruction of the paternal or maternal relationship, for example in mass disaster investigations [ 26 ] or in historical reconstructions. A classic case is the identification of two missing children of the Romanov family, the last Russian monarchy. MtDNA analysis combined with additional DNA testing of material from the mass grave near Yekaterinburg gave virtually irrefutable evidence that the two individuals recovered from a second grave nearby are the two missing children of the Romanov family: the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters [ 27 ]. Interestingly, a point heteroplasmy, that is, the presence of two slightly different mtDNA haplotypes within an individual, was found in the mtDNA of the Tsar and his relatives, which was in 1991 a contentious finding (Figure  3 ). In the early 1990s when the bones were first analyzed, a point heteroplasmy was believed to be an extremely rare phenomenon and was not readily explainable. Today, the existence of heteroplasmy is understood to be relatively common and large population databases can be searched for its frequency at certain positions. The mtDNA evidence in the Romanov case was underpinned by Y-STR analysis where a 17-locus haplotype from the remains of Tsar Nicholas II matched exactly to the femur of the putative Tsarevich and also to a living Romanov relative. Other studies demonstrated that very distant family branches can be traced back to common ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago [ 28 ]. Currently forensic Y chromosome typing has gained wide acceptance with the introduction of highly sensitive panels of up to 27 STRs including rapidly mutating markers [ 29 ]. Figure  4 demonstrates the impressive gain of the discriminative power with increasing numbers of Y-STRs. The determination of the match probability between Y-STR or mtDNA profiles via the mostly applied counting method [ 30 ] requires large, representative, and quality-assessed databases of haplotypes sampled in appropriate reference populations, because the multiplication of individual allele frequencies is not valid as for independently inherited autosomal STRs [ 31 ]. Other estimators for the haplotype match probability than the count estimator have been proposed and evaluated using empirical data [ 32 ], however, the biostatistical interpretation remains complicated and controversial and research continues. The largest forensic Y chromosome haplotype database is the YHRD ( http://www.yhrd.org ) hosted at the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Berlin, Germany, with about 115,000 haplotypes sampled in 850 populations [ 33 ]. The largest forensic mtDNA database is EMPOP ( http://www.empop.org ) hosted at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria, with about 33,000 haplotypes sampled in 63 countries [ 34 ]. More than 235 institutes have actually submitted data to the YHRD and 105 to EMPOP, a compelling demonstration of the level of networking activities between forensic science institutes around the world. That additional intelligence information is potentially derivable from such large datasets becomes obvious when a target DNA profile is searched against a collection of geographically annotated Y chromosomal or mtDNA profiles. Because linearly inherited markers have a highly non-random geographical distribution the target profile shares characteristic variants with geographical neighbors due to common ancestry [ 35 ]. This link between genetics, genealogy, and geography could provide investigative leads for investigators in non-suspect cases as illustrated in the following case [ 36 ]:

Screenshot of the 16169 C/T heteroplasmy present in Tsar Nicholas II using both forward and reverse sequencing primers ( Courtesy of Michael Coble, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, USA ).

Correlation between the number of analyzed Y-STRs and the number of different haplotypes detected in a global population sample of 18,863 23-locus haplotypes.

In 2002, a woman was found with a smashed skull and covered in blood but still alive in her Berlin apartment. Her life was saved by intensive medical care. Later she told the police that she had let a man into her apartment, and he had immediately attacked her. The man was subletting the apartment next door. The evidence collected at the scene and in the neighboring apartment included a baseball cap, two towels, and a glass. The evidence was sent to the state police laboratory in Berlin, Germany and was analyzed with conventional autosomal STR profiling. Stains on the baseball cap and on one towel revealed a pattern consistent with that of the tenant, whereas two different male DNA profiles were found on a second bath towel and on the glass. The tenant was eliminated as a suspect because he was absent at the time of the offense, but two unknown men (different in autosomal but identical in Y-STRs) who shared the apartment were suspected. Unfortunately, the apartment had been used by many individuals of both European and African nationalities, so the initial search for the two men became very difficult. The police obtained a court order for Y-STR haplotyping to gain information about the unknown men’s population affiliation. Prerequisites for such biogeographic analyses are large reference databases containing Y-STR haplotypes also typed for ancestry informative single nucleotide markers (SNP) markers from hundreds of different populations. The YHRD proved useful to infer the population origin of the unknown man. The database inquiry indicated a patrilineage of Southern European ancestry, whereas an African descent was unlikely (Figure  5 ). The police were able to track down the tenant in Italy, and with his help, establish the identity of one of the unknown men, who was also Italian. When questioning this man, the police used the information retrieved from Y-STR profiling that he had shared the apartment in Berlin with a paternal relative. This relative was identified as his nephew. Because of the close-knit relationship within the family, this information would probably not have been easily retrieved from the uncle without the prior knowledge. The nephew was suspected of the attempted murder in Berlin. He was later arrested in Italy, where he had committed another violent robbery.

Screenshot from the YHRD depicting the radiation of a 9-locus haplotype belonging to haplogroup J in Southern Europe.

Information on the biogeographic origin of an unknown DNA could also be retrieved from a number of ancestry informative SNPs (AISNPs) on autosomes or insertion/deletion polymorphisms [ 37 , 38 ] but perhaps even better from so-called mini-haplotypes with only <10 SNPs spanning small molecular intervals (<10 kb) with very low recombination among sites [ 39 ]. Each 'minihap’ behaves like a locus with multiple haplotype lineages (alleles) that have evolved from the ancestral human haplotype. All copies of each distinct haplotype are essentially identical by descent. Thus, they fall like Y and mtDNA into the lineage-informative category of genetic markers and are thus useful for connecting an individual to a family or ancestral genetic pool.

Benefits and risks of forensic DNA databases

The steady growth in the size of forensic DNA databases raises issues on the criteria of inclusion and retention and doubts on the efficiency, commensurability, and infringement of privacy of such large personal data collections. In contrast to the past, not only serious but all crimes are subject to DNA analysis generating millions and millions of DNA profiles, many of which are stored and continuously searched in national DNA databases. And as always when big datasets are gathered new mining procedures based on correlation became feasible. For example, 'Familial DNA Database Searching’ is based on near matches between a crime stain and a databased person, which could be a near relative of the true perpetrator [ 40 ]. Again the first successful familial search was conducted in UK in 2004 and led to the conviction of Craig Harman of manslaughter. Craig Harman was convicted because of partial matches from Harman’s brother. The strategy was subsequently applied in some US states but is not conducted at the national level. It was during a dragnet that it first became public knowledge that the German police were also already involved in familial search strategies. In a little town in Northern Germany the police arrested a young man accused of rape because they had analyzed the DNA of his two brothers who had participated in the dragnet. Because of partial matches between crime scene DNA profiles and these brothers they had identified the suspect. In contrast to other countries, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany decided in December 2012 against the future court use of this kind of evidence.

Civil rights and liberties are crucial for democratic societies and plans to extend forensic DNA databases to whole populations need to be condemned. Alec Jeffreys early on has questioned the way UK police collects DNA profiles, holding not only convicted individuals but also arrestees without conviction, suspects cleared in an investigation, or even innocent people never charged with an offence [ 41 ]. He also criticized that large national databases as the NDNAD of England and Wales are likely skewed socioeconomically. It has been pointed out that most of the matches refer to minor offences; according to GeneWatch in Germany 63% of the database matches provided are related to theft while <3% related to rape and murder. The changes to the UK database came in the 2012’s Protection of Freedoms bill, following a major defeat at the European Court of Human Rights in 2008. As of May 2013 1.1 million profiles (of about 7 million) had been destroyed to remove innocent people’s profiles from the database. In 2005 the incoming government of Portugal proposed a DNA database containing samples from every Portuguese citizen. Following public objections, the government limited the database to criminals. A recent study on the public views on DNA database-related matters showed that a more critical attitude towards wider national databases is correlated with the age and education of the respondents [ 42 ]. A deeper public awareness on the benefits and risks of very large DNA collections need to be built and common ethical and privacy standards for the development and governance of DNA databases need to be adopted where the citizen’s perspectives are taken into consideration.

The future of forensic DNA analysis

The forensic community, as it always has, is facing the question in which direction the DNA Fingerprint technology will be developed. A growing number of colleagues are convinced that DNA sequencing will soon replace methods based on fragment length analysis and there are good arguments for this position. With the emergence of current Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, the body of forensically useful data can potentially be expanded and analyzed quickly and cost-efficiently. Given the enormous number of potentially informative DNA loci - which of those should be sequenced? In my opinion there are four types of polymorphisms which deserve a place on the analytic device: an array of 20–30 autosomal STRs which complies with the standard sets used in the national and international databases around the world, a highly discriminating set of Y chromosomal markers, individual and signature polymorphisms in the control and coding region of the mitochondrial genome [ 43 ], as well as ancestry and phenotype inference SNPs [ 44 ]. Indeed, a promising NGS approach with the simultaneous analysis of 10 STRs, 386 autosomal ancestry and phenotype informative SNPs, and the complete mtDNA genome has been presented recently [ 45 ] (Figure  6 ). Currently, the rather high error rates are preventing NGS technologies from being used in forensic routine [ 46 ], but it is foreseeable that the technology will be improved in terms of accuracy and reliability. Time is another essential factor in police investigations which will be considerably reduced in future applications of DNA profiling. Commercial instruments capable of producing a database-compatible DNA profile within 2 hours exist [ 47 ] and are currently under validation for law enforcement use. The hands-free 'swab in - profile out’ process consists of automated extraction, amplification, separation, detection, and allele calling without human intervention. In the US the promise of on-site DNA analysis has already altered the way in which DNA could be collected in future. In a recent decision the Supreme court of the United States held that 'when officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure’ (Maryland v. Alonzo Jay King, Jr.). In other words, DNA can be taken from any arrestee, rightly or wrongly arrested, as a part of the normal booking procedure. Twenty-eight states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests with the aim of comparing profiles to the CODIS database, creating links to unsolved cases and to identify the person (Associated Press, 3 June 2013). Driven by the rapid technological progress DNA actually becomes another metric of quick identification. It remains to be seen whether rapid DNA technologies will alter the way in which DNA is collected by police in other countries. In Germany for example the DNA collection is still regulated by the code of the criminal procedure and the use of DNA profiling for identification purposes only is excluded. Because national legislations are basically so different, a worldwide system to interrogate DNA profiles from criminal justice databases seems currently a very distant project.

Schematic overview of Haloplex targeting and NGS analysis of a large number of markers simultaneously. Sequence data are shown for samples from two individuals and the D3S1358 STR marker, the rs1335873 SNP marker, and a part of the HVII region of mtDNA ( Courtesy of Marie Allen, Uppsala University, Sweden ).

At present the forensic DNA technology directly affects the lives of millions people worldwide. The general acceptance of this technique is still high, reports on the DNA identification of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks [ 48 ], of natural disasters as the Hurricane Katrina [ 49 ], and of recent wars (for example, in former Yugoslavia [ 50 ]) and dictatorship (for example, in Argentina [ 51 ]) impress the public in the same way as police investigators in white suits securing DNA evidence at a broken door. CSI watchers know, and even professionals believe, that DNA will inevitably solve the case just following the motto Do Not Ask, it’s DNA, stupid! But the affirmative view changes and critical questions are raised. It should not be assumed that the benefits of forensic DNA fingerprinting will necessarily override the social and ethical costs [ 52 ].

This short article leaves many of such questions unanswered. Alfred Nobel used his fortune to institute a prize for work 'in ideal direction’. What would be the ideal direction in which DNA fingerprinting, one of the great discoveries in recent history, should be developed?

Competing interests

The author declares that he has no competing interests.

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No two fingerprints are alike, which is why it's an effective means of identification. According to forensic scientist and fingerprint expert Simona Francese, no two people share the same fingerprints, even identical twins . "The probability of two individuals sharing the same fingerprints is 1 in 64 billion," Francese said, per Live Science . Fingerprints have been used as signatures since ancient times. Back then, finger impressions were used on clay tablets as a form of signature for important transactions between parties.

According to History Daily , it was known as far back as the 14th century that no two fingerprints were alike. However, it wasn't until 1856 that they were used as a form of identification. A British administrator named Sir William Herschel worked in India and required the use of fingerprints as identification on contracts to make them valid. It would be a few decades more when fingerprints were used in court to convict a defendant. In 1910, a man unknowingly left a fingerprint at the scene of the crime, and that served as the main evidence during his trial.

The case of Thomas Jennings

Thomas Jennings had just been released from prison six weeks prior in Joliet, Illinois , when he broke into the Hiller house on September 19, 1910, at about 2 a.m. Inside were Clarence Hiller, his wife, and their children, who were all asleep in bed. As reported by Illinois Courts , Jennings entered the eldest daughter Clarice's bedroom but she woke up and started screaming. Clarence was awakened by Clarice's shouts and immediately rushed to her daughter's room and confronted the intruder.

During the tussle, the two men tumbled down the staircase, and Clarice said she heard three gunshots. The intruder fled, and Clarence was left bleeding to death by the front door of his home. According to Smithsonian Magazine , neighbors were quick to call the police. They apprehended Jennings less than a mile away from the Hiller house. His clothes were bloody and torn, and he had a revolver with him. When authorities inspected the scene of the crime, they discovered that Jennings left his fingerprint on a railing that had just recently been painted. He reportedly held on to it as he pushed himself up to a window. Authorities took photographs of the fingerprint and cut off the railing to preserve it as evidence.

The first use of fingerprints as evidence

The fingerprint on the railing was compared with Thomas Jennings' fingerprints and 33 similar points of identification were seen, as reported by the Chicago Tribune . Fingerprints had never been used in court as evidence in the United States prior to Thomas Jennings' trial, but the judge allowed the prosecution to do so despite the objection of the defendant's attorney.

A newspaper article dated November 6, 1910, from the Chicago Tribune noted that several experts were called to testify in court about the fingerprints. Authorities from Chicago, a U.S. government investigator, and an inspector from Canada attested to the similarities between the fingerprint on the railing and Jennings' fingerprint. A side-by-side comparison was done, and similar areas were pointed out to the jury. The expert testimonies were enough for the jury to convict Jennings. His attorneys appealed the guilty verdict, but the Illinois Supreme Court stood by the conviction and stated, "The courts are justified in admitting this class of evidence." Jennings' appeals were eventually exhausted, and he was sent to the gallows in 1912.

Solving a Case of Murder by DNA Fingerprinting: A Case Study

• First Online: 07 February 2020

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• Hirak Ranjan Dash 4 ,
• Pankaj Shrivastava 4 &
• Surajit Das 5  

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DNA Fingerprinting Unit, State Forensic Science Laboratory, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, India

Hirak Ranjan Dash & Pankaj Shrivastava

Department of Life Science, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Odisha, India

Surajit Das

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Dash, H.R., Shrivastava, P., Das, S. (2020). Solving a Case of Murder by DNA Fingerprinting: A Case Study. In: Principles and Practices of DNA Analysis: A Laboratory Manual for Forensic DNA Typing. Springer Protocols Handbooks. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0274-4_27

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0274-4_27

Published : 07 February 2020

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The History and Legacy of the Latent Fingerprint Black Box Study

Examiner testimony in the forensic pattern disciplines (e.g., latent fingerprints, firearms, toolmarks, and footwear) has been under heavy scrutiny in recent years. High-profile misidentifications, admissibility challenges, and blue-ribbon committee reports have heightened criticism about the scientific basis of examiner testimony in these disciplines and the forensic methods on which they are based. “Black box” studies can help the field better understand the validity and reliability of these methods. This article explores the basis of the black box design and highlights the history and legacy of one particularly influential study — a 2011 black box study by the FBI that examined the accuracy and reliability of latent fingerprint examiner decisions. This study had an immediate and lasting impact in the courts and continues to help define a path forward for future research. The article also provides an overview of how the National Institute of Justice is working to support black box and similar studies across a number of forensic disciplines.

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