Let me tell you a story, dear readers, about a time long ago, when murderers who were CLEARLY GUILTY could be convicted without DNA evidence or fiber analysis, just good old OBVIOUSLY DAMNING circumstantial evidence. But enough of my soapbox. I've actually been planning to write on this for awhile now.
Forensic Science is a relatively new discipline, in its current form, anyway. But as long as people have been committing crimes, others have been solving them and dishing out justice. One of the first recorded cases of forensics solving a crime occurred in China in 1248. A body turned up with obvious injuries. But what caused them? First, the detective gathered all the types of weapons that could have caused the injury and tested them on dead animals. He determined that a sickle was the weapon. But whose? So he got everyone to bring him their sickles. None of them had any visible blood, but flies could smell what humans could not see. They landed on the blade that had traces of blood on it. The detective (in true Agatha Christie fashion, I'm sure) gathered all the suspects together and dramatically revealed the identity of the murderer.
The Chinese also knew by this time that if a body is fished out of the water without water in his lungs, he was dead before he hit the water. They knew that a person can be dead and have no visible signs of violence, but if she has fractured neck cartilage, she was strangled. And they could generally distinguish between accident, murder, and suicide.
In the 16th century, a French doctor began studied the effects of violence upon the internal organs. The science we know today as pathology began in 18th century Italy.
In 1776 a Swedish chemist devised a method to detect arsenic poisoning as a cause of death. It was refined by others, and finally secured a conviction in an 1836 murder trial.
The English (as anyone who's ever read about the exploits of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot could tell you), are intensely fond of using logic to solve cases. So it's no surprise that two of the first modern "whodunit" cases come from England. In 1784 a man was convicted of shooting another man in the head. The case was solved because pistols at the time required a wad of paper in the barrel to hold the ball and powder in place. The pistol wad found in the victim's head wound matched exactly a piece of newspaper found in the murderer's pocket.
In 1816 a farmhand was convicted of assaulting and drowning a servant girl in a shallow pond. In the mud by the pond, police found footprints and the impression of corduroy cloth with a patch sewn on. The print perfectly matched the trouser knee of the farmhand who was working nearby.
Later in the 19th century, an Argentine detective solved a murder with the aid of fingerprints. He had the foresight to cut off part of a door frame that had a bloody fingerprint on it.
Some techniques considered reliable in the past have now been called into question. Comparative bullet-lead analysis, studying the chemical composition of a bullet and tracing the bullet back to a specific maker, batch, and box, was first used by the FBI in 1963 during the inquiry into the Kennedy assassination. However, after four decades of using this technique, it was scrapped in 2005, because of unreliability. Forensic dentistry (studying bite marks) is still used, but has come under fire lately, because of at least two US cases where men were convicted based on their bite marks, but later exonerated by DNA.
This is actually really interesting me; I'm going to go ahead and post this, but I'm going to make a forensic timeline and post that today too. I feel like this kind of stuff is better organized in a timeline. So if you're interested, look out for that later today.
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