340 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 4 



In forming his own private judgment, the examining magistrate 

 relies on such examination of the accused ; he will obviously feel far 

 more satisfied in his own mind when he has managed to obtain an 

 actual confession; he can then conclude his investigation with a clear 

 conscience. 



Whatever the methods of criminal procedure or judicial inquiry- 

 employed, there is no disguising the fact that human evidence, in spite 

 of its weaknesses, still is and will remain, at least for many years to 

 come, one of the most important factors in any investigation. Later 

 on, we shall see how efforts have recently been made to remove the 

 arbitrary character of human evidence and reduce the possibilities of 

 error by introducing scientific methods. Human evidence was so 

 unreliable that it had to be supported by surer proof, and especially 

 by the evidence of facts. In order to satisfy himself of the guilt of 

 the accused, the investigator was obliged to seek conclusive evidence 

 independent of human statements. 



If he had not done so, the magistrate would have had no other choice 

 than to replace the evidence extorted by torture — unreliable though it 

 was — by his own subjective intuition and personal impressions, thus 

 reverting to a primitive form of justice, more or less based on guess- 

 work, which was precisely what has to be avoided. For the future 

 of the probative system, it was thus essential to introduce scientific 

 methods into criminal investigation. 



INTRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC METHODS 



The first science to be used in criminal investigation was forensic 

 medicine. Very often, an examining magistrate learns far more from 

 the medicolegal examination, or autopsy, than from all the evidence 

 supplied by witnesses, because no witness can know exactly what only 

 such an examination can reveal. It confirms or disproves the fact that 

 rape has been committed, and reveals the existence of internal injuries, 

 which are sometimes fatal but have been caused by blows leaving no 

 external mark; or, on the contrary, it shows that a death, which at 

 first appeared extremely suspicious, was in fact due to natural causes. 

 A medical expert often establishes the causes of death beyond all doubt, 

 describes the weapon used, the way in which it was employed, and the 

 immediate or delayed effects of a wound. Nowadays, a criminal inves- 

 tigation failing to start with a postmortem examination would be in- 

 conceivable, and the law has quite rightly made an autopsy compulsory 

 whenever permission to bury the body is withheld. 



It is even more necessary to employ scientific methods in cases of 

 poisoning, for it is obvious that a "chemical crime" is directly con- 

 nected with chemical methods. Thus toxicology, a science dealing 

 with accidental or intentional poisonings, came into being in the middle 



