FINGER-PRINTS AS DETECTIVES. (To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."
j 8.11,—In the interesting article on "Finger-Prints as Detec- tives" in the Spectator of September 20th you refer to the recent case in the Central Criminal Court as "the first that one recalls" where finger-prints have actually been "esed in the detection of crime." It is probably the first case in England, but in India four years ago a murderer VMS discovered and convicted on the evidence of his finger-prints. The main facts of the case are given in the work on "The Classifica- tion and Uses of Finger-Prints," by Mr. E. R. Henry, now the Assistant-Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis. The manager of a tea-garden was found lying in bed with his throat cut and his despatch-box and safe rifled. On one of the papers left in the despatch-box a small brown mark was noticed, which appeared to be the mark in blood of the finger or thumb of some one who had searched the box. On examining the records in the central office of the Bengal police, this mark was found to correspond with the print of the right thumb of one Kangali Charan, who had once been a servant of the deceased, and who had recently been released from prison. This man had not since his release been seen in the neighbourhood where the murder was committed, and was now living at a place hundreds of miles away ; but on the evidence of the finger-print he was arrested, and he was finally convicted, not of the actual murder, but of the theft of the murdered man's property. The case was taken to the Supreme Court on the question whether the evidence as to the finger-print was admissible, and there the conviction was upheld by the Judges. In Mr. Henry's book illustrations are given showing the blood-print on the paper, the print in the police records, and the print taken from Kangali Charan's band after his arrest. The system now in use in New Scotland Yard combines Mr. Galton's method of identification by finger-prints with Mr. Henry's method of classifying finger-print records. The former was introduced in 1894. At that time there was no way of classifying a large collection of records by means of the finger-prints, and the Bertillon system of measurement was adopted to aid in the classification ; but the Home Office Committee, on whose recommendation this step was taken, expressed a hope that ultimately a system of classification by finger-prints alone might be worked out. This was done in India by Mr. Henry, and his method has for several years been in general use there. Last year it was adopted by the Home Office for use in England, and it is now worked under Mr. Henry's own direction. Its value of course depends, not on its occasional use to discover the perpetrator of a crime, but on its regular and daily use to trace a criminal's previous convictions under other names. When a newly arrested prisoner's identity with an old criminal has once been discovered by his finger-prints, it can usually be proved either by his own admission or by the evidence of a warder or policeman who had Lim in custody on the occasion of one of his former offences ; and the actual evidence of the finger-prints therefore rarely comes before the Courts ; but the number of identifications of this class now being made by the finger-print system is very remarkable. In the first seven months of this year the number of such identifications averaged more than a hundred in each month, and it is steadily rising from month to month.—I am, Sir,
&c., C. E. T. P.S.—It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the case of Kangali Charan the administration of justice was aided by science in another point. The murdered man's cook was at first suspected on account of some blood-stains on his clothes ; but he resolutely asserted that they were stains from a pigeon's blood which he had killed for his master's dinner. It is possible by microscopic examination to distinguish the blood of a mammal from that of a bird, and an examination by an expert of the stains on the cook's clothes showed con- clusively that they could not be stains of human blood.
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