He wrote in Finger Prints that “it seemed reasonable to expect to find racial differences in finger marks, the inquiries were continued in varied ways until hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable.”Īs journalist Ava Kofman recently outlined in the Public Domain Review, Galton’s pursuit of fingerprint science meshed well with colonialist ideology of the time. Galton, who had also studied anthropometry in an effort to deduce the meaning behind physical measurements, did not find any major difference between races in his exhaustive collection of prints for research-but not for lack of effort.
It was thoroughly studied and chronicled in Galton’s 1892 epic tome Finger Prints (A cousin of Darwin, Galton had long focused on a series of experiments hoping to tie myriad personal and intellectual characteristics to physical traits and heredity). The concept of identifying people by unique fingerprints, first laid out 18 years earlier in Europe, even had its origin in pseudoscientific racial beliefs. Yet it’s not hard to envision that a jury, presented with an unfamiliar technique, would have been more skeptical with a white defendant. News reports at the time didn’t sensationalize race in their coverage, or even mention Hiller’s race. It’s unclear the degree to which Jennings’s race played a part in his trial. The Decatur Herald called it “the first conviction on finger-printing evidence in the history of this country,” adding with dramatic flourish that “the murderer of Hiller wrote his signature when he rested his hand upon the freshly painted railing at the Hiller home.” This made a distinct impression on the jury as well they voted unanimously to convict Jennings, who was sentenced to hang. A courtroom demonstration, however, backfired badly: Defense attorney W.G Anderson’s print was clearly visible after he challenged experts to lift the impression from a piece of paper that he had touched. The defense team even solicited prints from the public in an effort to find a match and disprove the theory that fingerprints were never repeated. Jennings’ defense attorneys raised questions about this new-and little understood-technique, as well as whether such evidence could even be legally introduced in court (the first time it was used in Britain, they claimed, a special law was needed to make such evidence legal). Further, the basic technique of collecting and comparing remains remarkably similar to what was applied to that rudimentary set of prints discovered at the Hiller home. Prints are still evaluated based on the same descriptions of arches, loops and whorls written by Sir Francis Galton in the late 19th century. Not only has fingerprinting had staying power in the legal system, the underlying method is fundamentally the same as when it was first introduced to American police departments. At times controversial, this method of solving cases endures more than a century later.
In the eyes of the court, they were right Hiller’s murder would lead to the first conviction using fingerprint evidence in a criminal trial in the United States. Police photographed and cut off the railing itself, claiming it would prove the identity of the burglar. But it was what he left behind that would be the focal point of his trial-a fingerprint from a freshly painted railing that he used to hoist himself through a window at the Hiller house. Thomas Jennings – an African-American man who had been paroled six weeks earlier - was stopped a half-mile away wearing a torn and bloodied coat and carrying a revolver. The unknown assailant didn’t make it far. Neighbors came running but the man had fled the home, leaving a dying Hiller by his front door. His daughter, Clarice, later recalled hearing three shots, followed by her mother screaming upstairs. In the ensuing scuffle, the two men fell down the staircase. Hiller, a railroad clerk, raced to confront the intruder. After a spate of robberies, residents of this South Side neighborhood were already on edge. on the night of September 19, 1910, Clarence Hiller woke to the screams of his wife and daughter in their home at 1837 West 104th Street in Chicago. Photo by Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images
Thomas Jennings, accused of murdering Clarence D.