A History of Forensic Science

British beginnings in the twentieth century

Alison Adam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135005580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

How and when did forensic science originate in the UK? This question demands our attention because our understanding of present-day forensic science is vastly enriched through gaining an appreciation of what went before. A History of Forensic Science is the first book to consider the wide spectrum of influences which went into creating the discipline in Britain in the first part of the twentieth century.

This book offers a history of the development of forensic sciences, centred on the UK, but with consideration of continental and colonial influences, from around 1880 to approximately 1940. This period was central to the formation of a separate discipline of forensic science with a distinct professional identity and this book charts the strategies of the new forensic scientists to gain an authoritative voice in the courtroom and to forge a professional identity in the space between forensic medicine, scientific policing, and independent expert witnessing. In so doing, it improves our understanding of how forensic science developed as it did.

This book is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminology, the history of forensic science, science and technology studies and the history of policing.

1 The relationship between science and law

Expert witnesses in the courtroom

Introduction

We begin by considering how the relationship between science and law influenced the development of scientific epistemology and how early echoes of this relationship continued to manifest themselves in the ‘warring experts’ in the courtroom phenomenon of the Victorian period and well into the twentieth century, where the new forensic expert witnesses grappled with their courtroom performances. A number of epistemological distinctions, important for the law and for science, were developed from the seventeenth century onwards. These include the concept of fact and evidence (especially physical evidence), the concepts of certain and probable knowledge (in other words, probability), witnessing and especially scientific expert witnessing. Scientific and legal epistemological categories are embedded within one another; they are mutually constitutive.¹ The notion of an expert witness was, to a considerable extent, developed in the seventeenth century where the man of science came to be seen as a reliable witness.² Proof and probability are central to the law and to science, and they are made and shaped in both places.³ After characterizing these developments, we turn to the development of the expert witness role and the significance of the professionalization of medicine and science in the nineteenth century.

Fundamental epistemological categories, which have become naturalized to the extent that their origins have disappeared from our collective consciousness, were used to claim authority and status, and eventually in the nineteenth century, would become critical markers of professionalization. The ability to assert authority over knowledge production of the natural world was an important element in the professionalization of science in the nineteenth century. Such a strategy was also evident in the professionalization of medicine in the same period, where attempts to gain autonomy and status were enhanced by claims for a scientific basis to medical knowledge. The professionalization of medicine and science were important elements helping to consolidate the expert witness role. The second half of the chapter turns to battles for authority that expert witnesses found themselves in the midst of in court, with the middle-to-late nineteenth century as the nadir of the battling experts period. Such problems did not disappear in the twentieth century. Hence, the strategies that later medico-legal experts and forensic scientists adopted to achieve authority in the courtroom under cross-examination and to deal with centuries-old epistemological categories of facts, evidence and probabilities provided a direct lineage from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

There were tensions between the certainty that scientific knowledge appeared to promise in the hands of credible scientific witnesses and the demands of the adversarial legal system. This meant that scientists acting as expert witnesses had to be adept at presenting evidence in court, holding their nerve in the face of hostile cross-examination. Claiming and maintaining authority in court was a major issue, not just in terms of the ability of the individual scientist’s credibility, but also in terms of the accepted credibility of a scientific technique. Handwriting evidence is a paradigm example of a forensic technique which eventually became accepted in court. For many, scientists included, the prospect of battling experts ranged on opposite sides of the courtroom was regarded as problematic. For, if scientific knowledge was objective and factual, as centuries of epistemological development in law and science had taught us to believe, how could scientists be put in such a situation of profound disagreement? A notorious poisoning case from the nineteenth century provides an example of the battle of experts at its most problematic.

Scientists who were acting as expert witnesses had to mount a performance in court, and it is clear that whereas some relished this and had developed appropriate supporting strategies, for others the performance was a difficult, and not entirely welcome, part of the job. On the other hand, the alternative, namely presenting written evidence without a court appearance, had its pitfalls too. Some medico-legal practitioners and forensic scientists were known to be star performers in the courtroom – indeed, some of the rising generation of forensic scientists recruited to the new roles opening up in the 1930s were head-hunted, at least in part, for their courtroom skills. But others felt that the need to perform under potentially hostile courtroom conditions was something of a contrast to their detailed, expert scientific work and developed strategies to cope with that contrast, strategies which they sometimes shared in popular and biographical works.

Facts, values and opinions

‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’⁴ Thus spoke Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’s utilitarian teacher in Hard Times. In his attempts to pour facts to the brim of the vessels of his pupils’ minds, Gradgrind was unlikely to have reflected that the concept of the ‘fact’ was a relatively recent construct. And if he did reflect on the origin of ‘facts’, given the marvels of Victorian science and engineering, he might have supposed that the idea of a fact came from scientific observations of the natural world.

For instance, even if we might disagree about whether some particular event or thing is itself a ‘fact’, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at least in everyday terms, we are unlikely to regard the concept of ‘fact’ as an epistemological category as particularly contentious. Even post-modern academics whose careers are built on a denial of the concept of fact, in shopping, cooking and catching trains, tend to act as though the world is full of facts. So ingrained is our understanding of facts that we have difficulty imagining a time when we did not have them. Fact, arguably the central epistemological concept of modern science, derives originally from the law, rather than science or, at least, derives from the intertwining of science and law.⁵

It was within law rather than natural sciences that the concept of ‘fact’ and the concomitant concept of ‘witness’ emerged because, of course, we cannot have facts without acknowledged, competent people to testify that something is a fact. Shapiro argues that ‘ “fact” does not begin with natural phenomena and was, if anything, a rather late arrival in natural philosophy, having become a well-established concept elsewhere before it was adopted by the community of naturalists’.⁶ ‘Fact’ and ‘matters of fact’ developed in law and were then taken up in other disciplines to the extent that they became part of general culture and intellectual life in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Britain. The Royal Society, founded in 1660 and still the most venerable scientific society in the UK, did much to develop the concept of fact into an epistemological category in science, and much of its early work as the newly established body for scientific research in the UK was involved with describing and cataloguing natural events and facts.⁷

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an important influence in the work of the early Royal Society. Indeed, the Baconian programme of developing scientific knowledge through exhaustive ‘fact’ gathering was influential in the early Royal Society’s scientific programme. As a lawyer, historian and man of science, Bacon was a leading figure in the transfer of ‘fact’ into the natural sciences alongside the idea that facts were things in the natural world that could be collected and reported by a reliable witness. But the concept of ‘fact’ was fluid and was far from immutable. Disciplines tended to reinvent the idea of fact finding to suit their own needs and requirements.⁸

So, the idea of ‘fact’ evolved in legal settings, was quickly transported into other areas and gradually became part of intellectual life by the end of the seventeenth century. In law, a ‘fact’ referred to a human activity which could be known about or directly witnessed.⁹ ‘Matters of fact’ were for juries to decide; ‘matters of law’ were the province of judges. It was the familiarity with determining facts that made it so easy to move fact from law into other domains. In English law, ‘fact’ had two related meanings – the more general meaning of any human act and the more specific meaning of the actual act which constituted the crime which was being tried in the court of law (we still use the term ‘after the fact’). Fact meant act, so the concept of fact tended to have a more active meaning in the legal realm than it did in its early scientific manifestation, where the great Baconian activities of gathering and classifying the materials of a somewhat passive natural world prevailed.

The idea that one could reliably know about people precedes the idea that one could reliably know about things. The development of the legal system in England then was a place where ‘juries, judges, witnesses, and counsel participated in a process that was designed to produce “morally certain” verdicts in “matters of fact” ’.¹⁰ Although first-hand perceptual evidence was desirable, it was recognized that if one could not have first-hand evidence, then a judgment had to be made about the credibility of a witness. Acknowledging Shapin and Schaffer’s research on the gentlemanly nature of scientific values of trust in making a scientific culture based on fact and gentlemanly status for credible witnessing, Shapiro nevertheless sees the development of the idea of fact as a more general feature of seventeenth-century intellectual life, arising at around the same time in several disciplines, including history, theology and, in particular, law. Rather than gentlemanly discourse based on social position promoting ‘fact’, especially scientific fact, Shapiro argues that it was the concept of fact, already in common use, that promoted their appropriately ‘gentlemanly’ modes of interaction. Ordinary people, as long as they had no conflict of interest, were perfectly able to decide matters of fact; the ability to witness was, therefore, not just confined to those o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor introduction
• Introduction
• 1 The relationship between science and law: Expert witnesses in the courtroom
• 2 The influence of scientific criminology and criminalistics
• 3 Technoscience and the technologies of criminal identification
• 4 Scientific detection, scientific aids and forensic science laboratories
• 5 Forensic science careers and self-images
• 6 Forensic science and forensic fiction
• Bibliography
• Index