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Using a freshly painted railing to flee a murder scene, he left behind something that would change forensics forever.
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By
Humanitarian Assistance Advisor
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鈥檛 make it far. Thomas Jennings 鈥 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鈥攁 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鈥檚 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.
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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鈥 defense attorneys raised questions about this new鈥攁nd little understood鈥攖echnique, 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鈥檚 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 鈥渢he first conviction on finger-printing evidence in the history of this country,鈥 adding with dramatic flourish that 鈥渢he murderer of Hiller wrote his signature when he rested his hand upon the freshly painted railing at the Hiller home.鈥
It鈥檚 unclear the degree to which Jennings鈥檚 race played a part in his trial. News reports at the time didn鈥檛 sensationalize race in their coverage, or even mention Hiller鈥檚 race. Yet it鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥攂ut not for lack of effort. He wrote in Finger Prints that 鈥渋t 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.鈥
As journalist Ava Kofman聽, Galton鈥檚 pursuit of fingerprint science meshed well with colonialist ideology of the time. 鈥淔ingerprints were originally introduced for Europeans to distinguish between the otherwise indistinguishable mass of extra-European peoples, who themselves produced 鈥渋ndecipherable鈥 fingerprints,鈥 she wrote. Later in his career, according to Kofman, Galton would later engage in quantifying racial differences, inventing 鈥渟cientific,鈥 numerical measurements to categorize humans by race.
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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鈥檚 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 鈥渢he assassin鈥檚 natal autograph鈥 鈥 which is to say the 鈥渂lood-stained finger-prints鈥 found on a knife- at the center of the dramatic courtroom finale in his novel Puddn鈥檋ead Wilson, published years before the Jennings case.
After Jennings鈥 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. 鈥淭his method of identification is in such general and common use that the courts cannot refuse to take judicial cognizance of it,鈥 the ruling stated.
Fingerprinting had thereby been 鈥減roclaimed by the Supreme Court of Illinois to be sufficient basis for a verdict of death by hanging,鈥 the聽Chicago Tribune聽reported, and it was the beginning of a shift toward the largely unquestioned use of fingerprint evidence in courtrooms across the United States. 鈥淭he Jennings case really is the earliest case 鈥 earliest published case 鈥 in which you鈥檒l find any discussion of fingerprint evidence,鈥 says Simon A. Cole, author of聽聽and professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology. 鈥淪o, in that sense it really is a precedent for the whole country.鈥
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People v. Jennings further specified that fingerprint evidence was something that the average juror would have to rely on interpretation to understand. 鈥淓xpert 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.鈥 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 鈥 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? 鈥淭he uniqueness of fingerprints is really kind of beside the point of the accuracy of the identification,鈥 says Cole. 鈥淭he best way to understand that is to think about eyewitness identification 鈥 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.鈥 Juries like the one that convicted Jennings were initially focused on whether prints were repeated, 鈥渨hereas really what we need to know is can people match them accurately.鈥
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 to determine if a witness鈥 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聽聽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聽聽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.
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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 in 2009 that addressed some of these shortcomings, acknowledging that 鈥渘ot 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.鈥
Fingerprint examiners rely on years of experience, 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 that 鈥渢he 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鈥 fingerprint examiner鈥檚 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.鈥
鈥淵ou鈥檒l 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,鈥 says David A. Harris, professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and author of 鈥淲here 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.鈥
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.
鈥淎 hundred years is kind of an impressive run,鈥 says Cole. 鈥淭here are some reasons for that 鈥 I think the fingerprint patterns are very information rich, you can see that there鈥檚 a lot of information packed into a small area.鈥 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.
Originally by , 12.05.2018, reprinted with for educational, non-commercial purposes.