670 CRIMINAL AInTHROPOLOGY. 



ought to seek also for the precedeuts somatic, psychic, and social, and 

 discover the conditions, surroundings, environments, not only of this 

 particular criminal but of all that have gone to produce such criminal 

 phenomena. It is now time to search for such indications as can be 

 furnished by anthropology and by criminal statistics, not only for iden- 

 tity, as given by the works of Bertillon, Voisiu, and Herbette, but also 

 the biology of crime as has been investigated by Ferri, Garofalo, and 

 Eighini. 



(2) The investigation and trial should be confided to those who 

 have been technically educated, experts of special training, one for 

 the prosecution and another chosen by the defense. The defense ought 

 to be admitted to take measures, to ask questions of medical juris- 

 prudence, such as he may need in the interest of his client, and upon 

 these questions the debate should take place and the judgment 

 rendered. This would not be a mere opinion, but would be a true de- 

 cision of a technical commission, which would settle at once and for- 

 ever all debate upon that question. It would be a trial before a tech- 

 nical jury as to the questions of medicine or medical jurisprudence or 

 psychiat'-y. It would also raise the professional dignity of the medical 

 jury, and would assure the world that, cost what it might, the research 

 would be in the interest of truth. The right of the judge to demand 

 the decision of science, and along with it the right and the power to 

 trample the decision under his feet is a manifest contradiction. We 

 who have always maintained that it is not reasonable to submit to a 

 common jury questions of medical jurisprudence, think it time to over- 

 turn the ancient maxim that the judge is the expert of experts. The 

 maxim may Hatter the vanity of the judge, but it is not true. Each one 

 to his place is the truth. When a question of medical jurisprudence 

 arises the medical jurist ought to be the judge. 



This question was brought up at the session of the congress at 

 Eome. Drs. Tamassia and Laccasagne presented it. There was an 

 important debate thereon, and the principle here laid down was ap- 

 proved with a single exception We propose that questions of medical 

 jurisprudence, of psychiatry, should be tried before a technical jury, 

 and that they should be authorized not simply to make a suggestion 

 and give an opinion, but to render that which is a real decision and a 

 final judgment. We believe the proposition' laid down in the Holy 

 Scriptures to be the true one, to give to Christ that which belongs to 

 Christ and to Cjesar that which belongs to Ciesar. 



(3) There should be established a system of preventive detention, 

 that is to say, there should be a detention for the purpose of preventing 

 crime by means of imprisonment of the individual before he has com- 

 mitted it, rather than to imprison him after as a punishment for having 

 committed it. The penal process or code in the Latin countries consists 

 of the two steps, one of instruction and the other accusation. In the 

 first the presumption of innocence prevails, and there the preventive 



