Why Fingerprint Identification

(From a handout given in class)

Fingerprints offer an infallible means of personal identification. That is the essential explanation for their having supplanted other methods of establishing the identities of criminals reluctant to admit previous arrests. Other personal characteristics change. Fingerprints do not.

In earlier civilizations branding and even maiming wereused to mark the criminal for what he was. The thief was deprived of the hand which committed the thievery. The Romans employed the tattoo needle to identify and prevent desertion of mercenary soldiers.

More recently law enforcement officers which extraordinary visual memories, so called "camera eyes" identified old offenders by sight. Photography lessened the burden on memory but was not the answer to the criminal identification problem. Personal appearances change.

Around 1870 a French anthropologist devised a system to measure and record the dimensions of certain bony parts of the body. These measurements were reduced to a formula which, theoretically, would apply only to one person and would not change during his adult life.

This Bertillion System, named after its inventor, Alphonse Bertillion, was generally accepted for thirty years, but it never recovered from the events of 1903. That was the year a man named Will West was sentenced to the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.