Who initiated the fingerprint system for identification?
The systematic use of FINGERPRINTS AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION
The systematic use of FINGERPRINTS AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION was initiated by William Herschel of the Indian Civil Service at Jungipur in 1858. On 28 July of that year he took the palm-print of Rajyadhar Konai, a local contractor from the village of Nista, on the back of a contract for 2,000 maunds of road metalling. The impress was made with the home-made oil-ink used by Herschel for his official seal, and included clear prints of all the fingers of the right hand. Herschel admitted that his original intention in taking Konai’s fingerprints was not so much for the purpose of positive identification as a means of frightening the Bengali out of all thoughts of repudiating the document at a later date, but so pleased was he with the success of the experiment that he determined to pursue it further. Accordingly, he inaugurated the first register of fingerprints while serving as Magistrate at Arrah, Bengal in June 1859. At first he contented himself with collecting the prints of his friends and colleagues, but on being transferred to Nuddea the following year he found such an alarming incidence of fraud and forgery that he began to investigate the possibility of enforcing the statutory use of fingerprints on leases and contracts. His proposals, however, were rejected by the Calcutta Secretariat. It was not until his appointment to the magistracy of Hooghly in 1877, when he became responsible for both the criminal courts and the Department for the Registration of Deeds, that he was able to introduce the use of fingerprinting for official purposes. In order to prevent Army pensioners from drawing their pensions twice over, he maintained a record of their fingerprints and required them to make an imprint on receipt of the money due, for purposes of comparison. At the same time the system was adopted at Hooghly Gaol as a precaution against the hiring of substitutes to serve sentences—a fairly common practice at the time—and also for the registration of legal documents. Herschel regarded fingerprinting chiefly as a means of preventing impersonation, and did not foresee its use in criminal investigation.
The- use of FINGERPRINTS USED AS A MEANS OF CRIMINAL DETECTION were advocated by Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, who made a number of experiments while employed at the Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo. He wrote in a letter to Nature, published in the issue for 28 October 1880.
When bloody fingermarks or impressions on clay. glass, etc., exist, they may lead to the scientific investigation of criminals. Already I have had experience in two such cases, and found useful evidence form these marks. In one case greasy fingermarks revealed who had been drinking some rectified spirit. The pattern was unique, and fortunately I had previously obtained a copy of it. They agreed with microscopic fidelity. In another case sooty fingermarks of a person climbing a white wall were of great use as negative evidence.
Faulds’s letter brought little immediate result, except the revelation of Herschel’s previous researches in the field. Failing to attract the notice of the Police Commissioners, he spent the rest of his life making vitriolic attacks on Herschel and anyone else who proved unwilling to accept his claim to be the sole pioneer of fingerprinting. The first police force to adopt the use of fingerprints for criminal investigation was the La Plata Division of the Provincial Police of Buenos Aires.
The first CONVICTION ON THE EVIDENCE OF FINGERPRINTS Was secured by the La Plata Police in July 1892. On 29 June at Necochea, Buenos Aires Province, a woman called Francisca Rojas had come running out of her house covered in blood, screaming that she had been attacked and her children murdered. She accused a neighbour called Velasquez, a ranch-worker who had been pestering her to marry him. He was arrested the same night, beaten up, and then bound and laid by the corpses of the two victims as an inducement to confess. When it was revealed that Rojas had a lover who had publicly declared he would marry her but for the children, the police began to entertain doubts, and on 8 July Inspector Eduardo Alvarez was sent from La Plata to search for incriminating evidence. He found it on a doorpost in the woman’s hut—a number of bloody fingermarks. Alvarez cut the wood away and sent it to headquarters at La Plata. The prints were compared with those of the suspect, and those of the mother of the murdered children, and found to correspond exactly with the latter. Confronted with this evidence, she broke down and confessed the crime. As there was no capital punishment for women in Argentina at that time, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The first criminals in Britain to have their fingerprints recorded were inmates of Pentonville Prison, over 100 of whom were fingerprinted by Francis Galton in a demonstration before a Home Department committee in 1893. As a result of the recommendations of the committee, fingerprinting was officially adopted by the Convict Office in 1895, but was of little practical use since the indexing of the prints was done on the ill-conceived Bertillon age system. The first police officer to be trained in finger-printing, Inspector C. Stockley Collins, received instruction at the Galton Laboratory the same year. The Metropolitan Police Fingerprint Bureau was established by Sir Edward Henry in July 1901. The first conviction on the evidence of fingerprints was secured by the Metropolitan Police in the case against Harry Jackson, accused of stealing billiard balls from a house at Denmark Hill in June 1902. Jackson had left an Imprint of his thumb on a freshly painted windowsill, and it was on this evidence that he was convicted at the Old Bailey on 13 September following.
