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

Fingerprinting Book Description - From Publishers Weekly - Beavan's lively debut explores developments in criminal forensics that culminated in the first prosecution based on fingerprint evidence, in London in 1905. He opens his narrative with the wanton double murder of the elderly Farrows and the crude initial investigation. Beavan, a writer for Esquire and other magazines, examines at length the slow scientific inroads into 19th-century law enforcement. Following the sharp decline in hanging offenses, European societies were swept by hysteria regarding multi-aliased career criminals. Officials reluctantly explored ways of confirming identities of repeat offenders, notably Alphonse Bertillon's anthropometric system, which posited that "criminal" body types could be identified by minute bodily measurements. Several British bureaucrats had experimented with inked fingerprints for identification, but Henry Faulds, an impoverished Scottish medical missionary in Japan, definitively claimed that fingerprints' particular qualities were ideal for criminal prosecution. Faulds's early publications spawned fingerprint science; unfortunately, his thunder was stolen by the ambitious, better-positioned Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin), whom Beavan portrays as an effete plagiarist. Police in South America and India ventured into this terra incognita, but Scotland Yard fiercely resisted. Only tragic anthropometric and eyewitness misidentifications led grudging officials to use the Farrows trial as a test case. The embittered Faulds served as a defense witness, contending that single-digit identification, the basis for this ultimately successful prosecution, was unreliable. This entertaining and balanced work centers less on academic precepts than does Simon Cole's Suspect Identities (see review below). Beavan's effortless prose, firm grasp of his subject and vividly drawn characters will delight history buffs and armchair criminologists. Photos and illus. (May)Forecast: This is a charmer that, with good reviews and effective promotion, could catch on outside the true-crime crowd. There will also be online promotion at the Web site www.fingerprintbook.com. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Paperback)

Fingerprinting Book Description - "No two fingerprints are alike," or so it goes. For nearly a hundred years fingerprints have represented definitive proof of individual identity in our society. We trust them to tell us who committed a crime, whether a criminal record exists, and how to resolve questions of disputed identity.

But in Suspect Identities, Simon Cole reveals that the history of criminal identification is far murkier than we have been led to believe. Cole traces the modern system of fingerprint identification to the nineteenth-century bureaucratic state, and its desire to track and control increasingly mobile, diverse populations whose race or ethnicity made them suspect in the eyes of authorities. In an intriguing history that traverses the globe, taking us to India, Argentina, France, England, and the United States, Cole excavates the forgotten history of criminal identification--from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing. He reveals how fingerprinting ultimately won the trust of the public and the law only after a long battle against rival identification systems.

As we rush headlong into the era of genetic identification, and as fingerprint errors are being exposed, this history uncovers the fascinating interplay of our elusive individuality, police and state power, and the quest for scientific certainty. Suspect Identities offers a necessary corrective to blind faith in the infallibility of technology, and a compelling look at its role in defining each of us.

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