After 2 a.m. on September 19, 1910, Clarence Shearer was awakened by the screams of his wife and daughter at his home at 1837 West 104th Street in Chicago. Residents of this south side community are already on edge after a series of robberies. Hiller, a railroad clerk, rushed to confront the intruder. In the ensuing melee, the pair fell down the stairs. His daughter Clarice later recalled hearing three gunshots, followed by her mother screaming upstairs. Neighbors came running, but the man had fled the home, leaving a dying redneck at his front door.

The unknown assailant didn't get far. Thomas Jennings, an African American who had been paroled six weeks earlier, was stopped half a mile away wearing a tattered coat and armed with a revolver. But it's what he left behind that is the focus of this trial - a fingerprint on a freshly painted railing that he used to climb out of a window in the Hiller home. Police took photos and cut off the railing themselves, claiming it would prove the identity of the thieves. In the eyes of the court, they were right; Hiller's murder would lead to the first conviction using fingerprint evidence in a U.S. criminal trial. Not only does this method of solving crimes, more than a century later, sometimes controversial,

have the staying power of fingerprints in the legal system, the basic method remains essentially the same as when it was first introduced to American police departments. Prints are still assessed against the same descriptions of arches, rings and whorls given by Sir Francis Galton at the end of the 19th century. Furthermore, the basic techniques of collection and organization remain very similar to the original set of fingerprints found at Hillel's house.

Jennings' defense lawyers raised questions about the new, little-known technology and whether such evidence could legally be introduced in court (they claimed it was the first time it had been used in the UK) evidence, a special law is required to legalize it). The defense team even solicited fingerprints from the public in an attempt to find a match and refute the theory that the prints were never repeated. However, a courtroom attack backfired: Defense attorney W.G. Anderson's fingerprints were clearly visible, and he challenged the experts to remove the impression from a piece of paper he had touched.

This also made a distinct impression on the jury; they voted unanimously to convict Jennings, who was sentenced to hang. The Decade Herald called it "the first conviction on fingerprint evidence in the country's history," adding, "Shearer's killer wrote as he placed his hand on the newly painted railing of Shearer's home. own signature. "

It's unclear how much of a role Jennings' race played in his trial. News reports at the time did not sensationalize race in their reporting or even mention it Shearer's race. Yet it's not hard to imagine a jury, presented with an unfamiliar technology, being more skeptical of a white defendant.

The concept was first introduced in Europe 18 years ago. It even had its origins in pseudoscientific racial beliefs, as suggested by Galton's 1892 epic Fingerprints (a cousin of Darwin's) who long undertook a series of experiments hoping to correlate countless personal and intellectual characteristics with the body. characteristics and heredity) were thoroughly studied and recorded. Galton also studied anthropometry, trying to deduce the meaning behind physical measurements, but he found none in the exhaustive fingerprints he collected for his research. Any significant differences between the races, but not for lack of effort, he wrote on the handprints: "It seemed reasonable to expect to find racial differences in the fingerprints, and the investigation continued in various ways until conclusive facts gave way to hope. is legitimate.

As journalist Ava Kofman wrote in a recent review of the public domain, Galton's pursuit of fingerprint science meshed well with the colonial ideology of the time. She wrote: “Fingerprints were originally introduced for Europeans to differentiate between large numbers of otherwise indistinguishable non-European people, who themselves created ‘unidentifiable’ fingerprints. ". According to Coffman, later in his career Galton would work on quantifying racial differences, inventing "scientific" numerical measurements to classify humans by race.

Although Thus, the system outlined by Galton was designed to identify unique characteristics that proved effective and was quickly adopted.

At the beginning of the 20th century, American police had just begun to follow their European counterparts and began collecting fingerprints for identification purposes. During the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Scotland Yard sent representatives to hold an exhibition demonstrating the technology, which became increasingly popular in British courts. Even Mark Twain got caught up in speculation about how those fingerprints could be used to catch criminals, placing "the assassin's personal signature" at the center of the dramatic courtroom finale of his novel "Plumton Head Wilson" - i. However, after Jennings was convicted of the "bloody fingerprints" found on the knife,

a book published a few years before the Jennings case, lawyers expressed concern about such a new and fresh crime. It challenges the idea that known technology can be admissible in court. After more than a year of appeals, on December 21, 1911, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the decision in People v. Jennings, confirming that Jennings's sentence would soon be enforced. They cited previous cases in the UK and published research to improve the credibility of fingerprint identification. The report pointed out that several witnesses in the Jennings case were trained by the respected Scotland Yard. The Chicago Tribune reported: "The ubiquity and pervasiveness of this identification method makes it impossible for the courts to refuse to judicially identify it." Therefore, the Illinois Supreme Court declared the fingerprint identification to be a sentence of death by hanging. sufficient basis. "There began a shift toward the essentially unquestioned use of fingerprint evidence in courts across the United States. "The Jennings case is really one of the earliest cases -- the earliest published cases -- in which you can find anything about fingerprint evidence. discussion,” said Simon A. Cole, professor of criminology, law, and sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Suspect Identification: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification in Social Ecology. “So in that sense, Said, this is indeed a national precedent. "

People v. Jennings further stated that fingerprint evidence is something that an average juror must rely on explanation to understand. "If the subject of the investigation is such that only a person with skill and experience can have knowledge of any facts relating thereto. If correct judgment is made, expert testimony is admissible. Legally, the inclusion of this statement is crucial: giving some degree of human judgment and interpretation, when fingerprint evidence is presented to a jury, it is incorporated into the court process. More than a century later, people are still Actively debate the extent to which it represents subjectivity, and how much potential room for error (however small) is acceptable.

Starting with the Jennings case, two fundamental questions have framed its approach in court. The basis for any challenge to admissibility. Is the technology itself justified (the main question when it was first introduced)? How accurate is the evidence when interpreted and applied to any specific case? Cole said: It actually has nothing to do with the accuracy of the identification. ". "The best way to understand this is to consider the identity of the eyewitnesses - no one would dispute that everyone entered this valuable information into the courts of the United States, affecting the trial and statistics of countless cases for more than a century.