Miscellaneous

Fun Fingerprint Facts

By Anne Skove, Esq.

• Fingerprint evidence was first used in the 1905 trial of Alfred and Albert Stratton. The brothers were convicted of murder.


• Ancient Babylonians impressed fingerprints onto clay tablets recording business transactions.


• Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) collected and studied fingerprints, and was the first to catalog prints in a system usable by law enforcement. He served as an expert witness in the Stratton trial.


• The FBI's fingerprint database is 10x as large as its DNA database.


• Dogs and cats don't have fingerprints, but primates, tree shrews, koalas, and some possums do. (Here, defense attorneys are making numerous notes to self!)


• Fingerprints are present by week twenty in utero.


• People with certain chromosomal defects have fingerprints with specific characterizations.


• When being booked, it is extremely bad form to poke the fingerprinting officer's white shirt repeatedly with your inky fingers.

See Historical Fingerprint Events & People, finger-prints.com, and Sticky Fingers, Natural History (December 2008-January 2009).

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).