Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity

Herschel’s mind raced as he read over their agreement, penned by Konai in Bengali script. Even this written contract might prove useless, Herschel realized, since contractors had begun to deny their own signatures. Suddenly, it occurred to him “to try an experiment by taking the stamp of his hand … to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature.” This spontaneous printing of Konai’s hand would later lead to Herschel’s being the first in British history to regularly use fingerprints officially.

Born on January 9, 1833, William James Herschel came from an eminent scientific family. His grandfather William Herschel, an astronomer, discovered the planet Uranus. His father, John Herschel, also an astronomer, invented the sensitized paper on which photographs are printed. As a young man, William James, too, was scientifically inclined, but his father encouraged him to strike out in a new direction, so he joined the Indian Civil Service at the age of twenty. Five years later, his promotion to Assistant Joint Magistrate and Collector came in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny, a beginning in India’s struggle for independence and the reason for the civil unrest in Herschel’s new district.

The mutiny began after sepoys, Indian troops employed by the British, protested the recent issue of the new Enfield rifle. To load the Enfield, the ends of its cartridges, believed to be lubricated with pigs’ and cows’ lard, had to be bitten off. This clashed with both Hindu and Muslim dietary prohibitions, and in April 1857, sepoy troopers at Meerut refused to use their new rifles. When they were jailed for their refusal, their incensed comrades rose up and shot their British officers, sparking a murderous rebellion that swept the country.

The British responded with ferocious vengeance. Shipped-in reinforcements took no prisoners, bayoneting to death captured sepoys in frenzied massacres. They hanged whole villages, including women and children, for their perceived sympathy with the mutineers. Even after the revolt was suppressed in mid-1858, British soldiers lashed sepoys convicted of mutiny to the muzzles of their cannons and fired cannonballs through their chests. With their bodies blown to pieces, according to Hindu religion, the victims had no hope of entering paradise, making the punishment even more cruel.

The slaughter ended but the conclusion of what the Indians called “the Devil’s Wind” did not halt the population’s defiance of the unpopular British ruling class. Terrified of revenge for outright rebellion, they subtly engaged in various forms of civil disobedience, including the breaking of contracts with administrators like Herschel. If the administrators took them to court, the Indians simply repudiated their own handwriting. The British were in no position to insist that a signature written in Bengali had come from any particular hand, especially given the region’s volatility.

Hoping to keep his road-building project on track Herschel wanted a signature from Konai that couldn’t be so easily denied. “I dabbed his palm and fingers over with homemade oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole hand on the back of the contract,” Herschel wrote in his memoir The Origin of Fingerprinting. He made a second impression of his own hand, on a separate paper, and pointed out to Konai the distinctive differences between the two. You may think you can deny your handwriting, Herschel communicated to Konai, but you’ll never be able to deny that this outline of a hand and these lines of the palm belong to you and no one else. The scheme worked. Konai delivered the road-making materials as promised.

Herschel, impressed with his newfound ability to frighten someone into honoring a contract, experimented with handprints until he eventually hit upon printing just the fingertips, which was less messy. The Chinese and Japanese, probably the first to make widespread use of fingerprints as signatures, had used them on contracts as early as 600 A.D. Herschel, several authorities have written, likely borrowed the idea from a colony of Chinese living in Calcutta, though Herschel always insisted that the fingerprint conception had come in a sudden flash of his own inspiration.

In 1859, Herschel began collecting, as keepsakes, the fingerprints of his friends, colleagues, and family. Each impression, Herschel noted, was different, convincing him, over time, that fingerprints were unique to each individual. His notebooks included fingerprints taken from the tiny fingers of babies, from Indian nobility, and from old college friends, all dated and labeled by name the way some people collect autographs. He even took the inked impression of a dog’s nose: “a little white and black terrier at 2 months.” (Much later in history, the inked imprints of the skin patterns on the noses of cattle and horses would also be found to be individual and used to identify them as a safeguard against theft.)

In 1860, Herschel came up with another application for his fingerprint idea. In Nuddea, near Calcutta, where Herschel took a position as magistrate, the landowners had been turfing the tenant farmers off the land for non-payment of rent. The farmers, who cultivated indigo, the primary ingredient of blue dye at the time, couldn’t pay because the landowners had not discounted rents in line with an indigo market decline. Disputes between tenants and farmers erupted at first into riots and later into the courtrooms of magistrates like Herschel.

Tenants, desperately clinging to their land, insisted that landlords tried to collect much higher rents than they’d agreed on in their leases. They presented the supposed documents as evidence, but many of them turned out to be forgeries, made particularly hard to detect because they were impressed with replicas of the landlords’ seals. Herschel, frustrated by the flow of worthless paper through his courtroom, concluded that landlords should throw out their seals and instead authenticate leases with fingerprints. He set out to develop his fingerprint signature idea for widespread use.

He concerned himself first with insuring that fingerprints could not be forged like the landlords’ seals. He commissioned artists around Calcutta to copy his fingerprint, but none made even a close facsimile. In anticipation of the businessmen’s objections to the messy application of ink to their fingers, he wrote in 1862 to his much more practical brother-in-law, Alexander Hardcastle, and asked him to “devise an utterly simple device for inking the finger.”

Finally, in 1863, when the non-payment of rent had reached crisis point and land and lease litigation choked the courts, Herschel penned an official letter to his superiors suggesting his system for prevention of lease forgery. The first two fingers of both the landlord and the tenant should be impressed on each lease, he wrote, so that neither could alter it or disavow it in the future. Government higher-ups rejected Herschel’s idea, feeling that it might cause ill feeling just at the time when the indigo disturbances were quieting down. Herschel bided his time.

Fourteen years passed before a more senior Herschel, now magistrate of Hooghly, near Calcutta, was finally able to institute fingerprinting under his own authority. He introduced the system in three separate departments. For a year-long period, between 1877 to 1878, government pensioners in his region signed for their monthly payments with fingerprints. At the registry of deeds, land owners impressed fingerprints to authenticate their transactions. At the courthouse, convicts were forced to fingerprint their jail warrants so hired substitutes could not take their place at the prison. One year before he retired and moved back to England, nearly twenty years after he first came up with the idea, Herschel had finally put fingerprints to official use.

Herschel had, with a little help from the Chinese, conceived the use of fingerprints to irrefutably identify documents with their signatories. But he did not realize until much later, when it was pointed out to him, that fingerprints could be used to identify unknown criminals. Nor had he developed the fingerprint concept sufficiently to be used for that purpose.

Nowhere in his writings, for example, did Herschel mention any large-scale experiments to determine for certain that no two fingerprints were alike. Nor did he discuss what features of two fingerprints should be compared to determine if they had come from the same or different fingers. In fact, the fingerprints in the record books from the Hooghly Registry of Deeds, made in runny, water-based ink, were so faint and smeared that they were often indistinguishable. Even if Herschel understood the technical nuances of fingerprinting, it is clear that his subordinates did not. Under Herschel, fingerprints were more effectively used as a means of intimidation than for any real scientific purpose.

In his 1917 memoir, Herschel would nevertheless claim sole credit for conceiving the fingerprint method of criminal identification, even denying the contributions of the Chinese. As supposed documentary evidence, he produced what was to be known as the “Hooghly Letter,” written by him in August 1877 to Bengal’s Inspector of Jails and Registrar-General. In it, he suggested the widespread expansion of the two-digit fingerprint signatures he used in Hooghly to jailers’ warrants and deed registries throughout Bengal. His suggestion was rejected. More importantly, his letter suggested neither the use of fingerprints to identify unknown criminals in police custody nor their use as crime-scene evidence. Herschel’s letter did not suggest the fingerprint system as it is used today.

In 1878, when Herschel returned to England permanently, his successor in Hooghly did not see the value in Herschel’s fingerprint registration, and discontinued it. After only one year, Herschel’s system fell into disuse. It had not proved itself to anyone but Herschel himself. So, though it was already being quietly investigated by the obscure Scottish medical missionary Henry Faulds in Japan, fingerprinting again fell temporarily into obscurity. This time it did so right when jailers, police, and criminologists needed a system of identification more than ever before.

“… Lawrence Earl Ferrers, Viscount Tamworth, shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead and … his body will be dissected and anatomized,” said a writ of execution read out in the House of Lords in May 1760. When Earl Ferrers’s wife left him because of his bouts of drunken violence, a man named Johnson got the job of collecting her maintenance payments. The earl grew to hate Johnson and his monthly visits, and eventually shot him dead. It was for this that Ferrers was tried and condemned by the House of Lords.

At the appointed hour, the noose descended over the earl’s head, the gallows trap door swung open under his feet, and he fell until the rope jerked him to a sudden stop. His neck broke with a sickening crack. After his body hung limp and lifeless for the customary hour, undertakers carted it to Surgeon’s Hall in the City of London for dissection. Surgeons slit open the abdomen and removed his bowels. They sliced two strips of flesh from his chest and drew them open like curtains to reveal his bloody organs. His eviscerated body, then displayed in a public gallery as a warning against would-be murderers, became a cheap, gory sideshow for the public to parade past. Earl Ferrers’s memory suffered its final insult.

The gutting, a fate reserved especially for murderers in eighteenth-century Britain, numbered just one among the many ruthless provisions of the period’s criminal law, known as the “Bloody Code.” For over 200 different crimes, the Code prescribed death as easily as today’s law might call for community service. Begging, if you were a soldier or sailor, could earn you a stretch of the neck, and so could spending more than a month with gypsies. Between 1805 and 1818, a fifth of those who mounted the gallows’ steps under the Code had done nothing worse than forge bank notes.

Continental society was just as cruel to its criminals. Three years before Earl Ferrers’s gutting, France sentenced Robert-François Damiens to be burned and cut to pieces for trying to stab Louis XV. Each time red-hot pincers tore off a piece of Damiens’s flesh and opened a new wound, molten lead was poured in to stanch the flow of blood. Letting Damiens bleed to death would be far too kind. “My God, have pity on me. Jesus, help me!” Damiens moaned. When the executioner finally tethered six strong horses to Damiens’s arms and legs, his body proved too strong to be pulled apart. Only after his tendons were cut did Damiens’s limbs tear from their sockets.

Not all eighteenth-century criminals suffered such endless torture. In lower-profile cases, judges sometimes broke from the law and showed mercy. But this discretionary sentencing turned the judicial process into a sort of high-stakes crap shoot. For the same crime, depending on the judge, one lucky outlaw might be exiled to America, while another might be tortured or killed. This uneven application of the law undermined its moral authority. It was for this reason, not because of compassion for the condemned, that Europe’s great legal thinkers finally called for change.

In 1764, the Milanese statesman Cesare Beccaria published Dei deletti e delle pene (Crimes and Punishment) a seminal book on criminology. It sparked a hundred years’ worth of legal reforms, leading, eventually, to a system that could not operate without an infallible method of identification, such as fingerprinting. A twenty-six-year-old aristocrat, trained in law at the University of Pavia, Beccaria argued that, because of piecemeal development over several centuries, criminal law was an irrational mishmash. Prescribed punishments bore no relation to the seriousness of their crimes. “Whomsoever sees the same death penalty, for instance, decreed for the killing of a pheasant and for the assassination of a man … will make no distinction between the crimes,” Beccaria wrote.

Criminal law needed a massive overhaul. Beccaria called for standardized punishments that were only severe enough to make would-be criminals think twice. The certainty of a punishment, not its severity, had the greatest deterrent effect, he said. A burglar, positive of being caught and sent to jail, even for a short time, was less likely to commit a robbery than one who, if caught, might be executed.

Beccaria’s writing inspired humanitarian reformers across Europe. In England, philosopher Jeremy Bentham took up Becarria’s cause in a 1789 book of his own, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He argued that the object of all legislation should be the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” A punishment should not inflict any more unhappiness than the crime it was designed to deter. By this standard, executing thieves and other petty criminals was immoral.

For one of Bentham’s disciples, Samuel Romilly, the end of the death penalty became a quest. The Member of Parliament campaigned tirelessly to reform the Bloody Code and to rid the law of its overbearing cruelties. In 1808, he won a victory when he championed legislation abolishing the death penalty for pickpockets. But Romilly didn’t live to see the other fruits of his labors. Heartbroken by the death of his wife, he committed suicide in 1818 at the age of sixty-one.

Between 1832 and 1834, the English Parliament abolished the death penalty for shoplifting a value of five shillings or less, forgery of coins, returning from deportation, letter-stealing, and religious sacrilege. By 1861, only four offenses would be punishable by death: murder, treason, piracy with violence, and arson of royal dockyards. The hangman had seen his day.

Around the continent, prisons sprang up to house criminals spared by the less-often-employed gallows. England’s first national penitentiary, Millbank, in London, locked the cell door on its first prisoner in 1816. Pentonville Prison came in 1842, and by 1848, around the country, England had erected fifty-four new prisons, providing 11,000 new cells. In the previous century, prisons had housed only debtors and unfortunates awaiting their turns at trial or the gallows.

Early in the reign of the jailkeeper, in the 1820s and 1830s, crime statistics made their first appearance. They revealed the existence of a breed of hardened outlaws who, no matter how often they went to jail, always returned to their villainous ways. As a social phenomenon, the group quickly attracted the interest of science. Why would this group, in spite of the risks, return again and again to their lawbreaking? Were they bad in their very essence? Or was society somehow to blame?

One of the world’s first demographers, the Belgian Lambert Adolphe Quételet, took up these questions. Quételet analyzed three years of French crime statistics, and he published his findings in his 1835 book Sur L’homme (known in English as A Treatise on Man, and the Development of His Faculties). A third of murders, he found, occurred during barroom brawls. Young working-class men accounted for the greatest proportion of crime. Upper-class villains tended more toward personal violence than theft.

His great criminological discovery was the connection between crime rates and social conditions. When the economy dipped, law-abiding citizens suddenly started stealing. Old thieves stole more often. Crime waves and economic recessions correlated so closely that felons appeared to have no free will. It was as if, in bad times, some societal puppeteer began pulling their strings. Quételet concluded that the blame for lawbreaking belonged partly to society. The severity of a criminal’s punishment should therefore depend on the circumstances of his crime.

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