Fingerprinting

Detectives arrived on the scene after complaints of screaming heard by a neighbor down the street. Besides the blood painted walls and drenched sheets, there lay a lump of human parts on the bed. What they found was the body of a prostitute that had been bound and beheaded with her liver placed between her lacerated legs. Recognized to be human only by the eyes that were missing from her skull, she had fallen victim to a psychotic eradicator. Jack the Ripper, known as one of the most historically significant serial killers of all time, left his victims’ bodies most unidentifiable, but not the latent fingerprints he left behind that later convicted him.

Forensic science used in criminal justice has recently been revolutionized with new DNA technology, but fingerprinting is still the most valid and effective form of identification used in law enforcement today.

Going back in the time of ancient Babylon, fingerprints and ridge patterns were used on clay tablets for business transactions and governmental procedures. By the 14th century, the fact that no two prints were alike was becoming more noticeable, thus the history of the fingerprint began (Von Minden 1).

Noting the ridges, spirals, and loops in fingerprints, Marcello Malp

. . .

View the whole essay, without interruption

When cyanoa crylate is heated, the fumes evaporate onto porous surfaces, permanently preserving latent prints. Plain whorls are circular patterns that have ridges (raised skin), not furrows (lowered skin), making up most of the pattern in a circular motion. One in 64 billion fingerprints have been concluded to have the same twelve-point identities. It’s caused by oily discharges of the hands and are usually visible to the human eye.

Famously, in 1891, Juan Vucetich, an Argentine Police Official, was the first to identify a criminal with their own fingerprint.

When taking a print from a crime scene, the easiest to preserve is the latent print. His system was solely based on comparing the size of body parts, such as the skull, legs, feet, etc.

Finally, in 1901, Sir Edward Richard Henry revised Galton’s classification system and started the Henry Classification System which is still used to this day (Von Minden 3). After taking the lives of her two sons, then slitting her own throat, the perpetrator, known as Rojas, had left her bloody prints on a doorknob, which correctly identified her as the murderer. The Henry Classification is mainly used for the manual filing of fingerprint cards. Then, in 1823, a professor of anatomy at the University of Breslau, John Evangelist Purkinji, discussed nine fingerprint patterns in a published thesis, but still did not take notice to the individuality of each print (Von Minden 1). It was found that they were identical twins with shockingly similar prints. If the loop is arching toward the ulnar bone, it’s classified as an ulnar loop If the loop is arching toward the radial bone, then it’s classified as the radial loop. Though fingerprints have been used for thousands of years, the present systems of classification have only been utilized in the past 100 years.

Approximate Word count = 1606
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.