ABSTRACT
Accusing someone of a crime based on scientific evidence might seem perfectly ordinary nowadays, but this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even murder (‘killing’), for instance, had long depended on, as Gaskill (2000: 242) puts it, ‘people passing information to unpaid, untrained law officers, or what together they gleaned from pretrial investigations conducted informally in the community’. By the late eighteenth century, however, a ‘judicial insistence’ on ‘higher evidential standards’ encouraged ‘more thorough investigative methods’. Testimony from community members was surpassed by ‘the development of detective policing and the routine presentation of forensic medical evidence by expert witnesses’ (2000: 242). Throughout the nineteenth century, ‘science’ – rather than inquisitorial or religious procedures – was increasingly called upon to validate accusations and, amid fears of rising crime waves, to identify criminals (Radzinowicz & Hood, 1990). As seen in the previous chapter, This was especially so where persistent criminals were distinguished as incorrigible delinquents that collectively formed a discrete ‘criminal class’ with debased habits of character. 1 Those habits were said to render them ‘habitually criminal’, requiring special control measures, including precise identification methods.
