at 2 am on September 9, 1911, Clarence Hiller was awakened by the screams of his wife and daughter at her home at 1837 West 114th Street in Chicago. After a series of robberies, the residents of this southern community are already very nervous. Shearer, a railway clerk, quickly confronted the intruder. In the ensuing scuffle, the two fell down the stairs. His daughter clarice later recalled that she heard three shots, and then her mother screamed upstairs. Neighbors came running, but the man had fled home, leaving a dying hillbilly at his front door.
the unidentified attacker didn't go far. Thomas Jennings, an African-American who was paroled six weeks ago, was stopped half a mile away wearing a tattered coat and holding a revolver. But it was what he left behind that was the focus of this trial-a fingerprint on a newly painted railing, which he used to climb out of a window of the Shiller family. The police took photos and cut off the railings themselves, claiming that this would prove the identity of the thief. In the eyes of the court, they are right; Shearer's murder will lead to the first conviction using fingerprint evidence in American criminal trials. After more than a century, this method of solving crimes sometimes causes controversy, but < P > not only has the durability of fingerprints in the legal system, but its basic method is basically the same as that when it was first introduced into the American police department. Printed matter is still evaluated according to Sir Francis Galton's description of arches, rings and threads at the end of 19. In addition, the basic technology of collecting and sorting is still very similar to the original set of fingerprints found in Shiller's house.
Jennings' defense lawyers questioned this new and little-known technology and whether this kind of evidence can be legally introduced in court (they claimed that when such evidence was first used in Britain, a special law was needed to legalize it). The defense team even collected fingerprints from the public, trying to find a match and refuting the theory that fingerprints have never been repeated. However, a court case backfired: the fingerprint of defense lawyer W.G. Anderson was clearly visible, and he challenged the experts to remove this impression from a piece of paper he touched.
This also left a clear impression on the jury; They voted unanimously to convict Jennings, who was sentenced to hanging. The Ten-Year Herald called it "the first conviction of fingerprint evidence in the history of the country", and he exaggerated that "the killer of Shearer wrote his signature when he put his hand on the railing of Shearer's new paint house."
It is unclear how much role Jennings' race played in his trial. At that time, the news reports did not stir up the race in the report, and even did not mention Shearer's race. However, it is not difficult to imagine that a jury, with a strange technology, will have greater doubts about a white defendant.
This concept was first put forward in Europe 2118 years ago, and it even originated from pseudo-scientific racial beliefs. Galton's epic masterpiece Fingerprint in 1892 (a cousin of Darwin, Galton devoted himself to a series of experiments for a long time, hoping to link countless personal and intellectual characteristics with physical characteristics and heredity) made a thorough study and record on it. Gao Erdun also studied anthropometry, trying to infer the meaning behind physical measurement, but he didn't find any significant differences between races in the detailed fingerprints collected for his research, but it wasn't because of lack of efforts. He wrote on the handprint: "It seems reasonable to expect to find racial differences in fingerprints, and the investigation will continue in various ways until the conclusive facts make the hope no longer justified."
as a journalist, Ava Kofman r, in his recent comments in the public domain, Gao Erdun's pursuit of fingerprint science was well combined with the colonial ideology at that time. She wrote: "Fingerprints were originally introduced for Europeans, in order to distinguish a large number of people outside Europe who were originally indistinguishable. They made their own" unrecognizable "fingerprints." . According to coffman, in the later period of his career, Galton will be engaged in quantifying racial differences and inventing "scientific" digital measurement methods to classify human beings by race.
Nevertheless, the system outlined by Galton aims to identify unique features that have been proved to be effective, and it has been applied quickly. At the beginning of the 21th century, American police just started to follow the example of their European counterparts and began to collect fingerprints for identification. During the World Expo held in St. Louis in 1914, Scotland Yard sent representatives to hold an exhibition to show this technology, which became more and more popular in English courts. Even Mark Twain was caught in the speculation about how to use these fingerprints to arrest criminals. He put the assassin's biological signature in the center of the dramatic court ending in the novel "Putton Head Wilson"-that is, the "bloody fingerprints" found on the knife. However, after Jennings was convicted, the book < P > was published a few years before Jennings case, and lawyers were interested in such a new and little-known technology. After more than a year's appeal, on February 21th, 1911, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the judgment of People v. Jennings, and confirmed that Jennings' judgment would be executed soon. They cited previous cases in Britain and published research in this field to improve the credibility of fingerprint identification. The report pointed out that several witnesses in the Jennings case were trained by the prestigious Scotland Yard. The Chicago Tribune reported: "The universality and universality of this appraisal method make it impossible for the court to refuse judicial recognition." Therefore, the Illinois Supreme Court declared < P > fingerprint identification as a sufficient basis for the hanging sentence. "began to turn to the use of fingerprint evidence in courts all over the United States basically without doubt. "The Jennings case is indeed the earliest case-the earliest published case-in this case, you can find any discussion about fingerprint evidence," said Simon A. Cole, a professor of criminology, law and sociology at the University of California, Irvine College, and the author of "Suspect Identity: A History of Fingerprint Identification and Criminal Identification". "Therefore, in this sense, this is indeed a national precedent."
People v. Jennings further pointed out that fingerprint evidence is something that ordinary jurors must rely on interpretation to understand. "If the theme of the investigation is that only people with skills and experience can make a correct judgment on any facts related to it, then expert testimony is acceptable." Legally, it is very important to include this statement: it gives a certain degree of human judgment and explanation, and when the fingerprint evidence is submitted to the jury, it is included in the court proceedings. More than a century later, people are still actively debating the degree of subjectivity and how much potential error space (no matter how small) is acceptable.
from the Jennings case, two basic questions formed the basis of any doubt about its admissibility in court. Is the technology itself reasonable (the main problem when it was first introduced)? How accurate is the evidence when it is interpreted and applied to any specific case? Cole said: "The uniqueness of fingerprints has nothing to do with the accuracy of identification." . "The best way to understand this is to consider the identity of witnesses-no one will question that all people input these valuable information into American courts, which has affected the trial and statistics of countless cases for more than a century.