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Julius Caesar is assassinated. Following this event, a physician performed an autopsy, and determined that of the 23 wounds found on the body, only one was fatal.
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Julius Caesar is assassinated. Following this event, a physician performed an autopsy, and determined that of the 23 wounds found on the body, only one was fatal.
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Germanic and Slavic societies made law that medical experts must be the ones to determine cause of death in crimes.
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Fingerprints first used to determine identity. Arabic merchants would take a debtor's fingerprint and attach it to the bill.
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Fingerprints first used to determine identity. Arabic merchants would take a debtor's fingerprint and attach it to the bill.
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First forensic science manual published by the Chinese. This was the first known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases.
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First forensic science manual published by the Chinese. This was the first known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases.
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First pathology reports published.
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First pathology reports published.
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First recorded instance of physical matching of evidence leading to a murder conviction (John Toms, England). Evidence was a torn edge of newspaper in a pistol that matched newspaper in his pocket.
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German chemist Valentin Ross developed a method of detecting arsenic in a victim's stomach, thus advancing the investigation of poison deaths.
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Clothing and shoes of a farm laborer were examined and found to match evidence of a nearby murder scene, where a young woman was found drowned in a shallow pool.
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James Marsh, an English chemist, uses chemical processes to determine arsenic as the cause of death in a murder trial.
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James Marsh, an English chemist, uses chemical processes to determine arsenic as the cause of death in a murder trial.
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San Francisco uses photography for criminal identification, the first city in the US to do so.
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San Francisco uses photography for criminal identification, the first city in the US to do so.
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Henry Faulds and William James Herschel publish a paper describing the uniqueness of fingerprints. Francis Galton, a scientist, adapted their findings for the court. Galton's system identified the following patterns: plain arch, tented arch, simple loop, central pocket loop, double loop, lateral pocket loop, plain whorl, and accidental.
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Coroner's act established that coroners' were to determine the causes of sudden, violent, and unnatural deaths. Arthur Conan Doyle also publishes the first Sherlock Holmes story.
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Anthropometry, a system using various measurements of physical features and bones, used throughout the US and Europe. Using the system, a criminal's information could be reduced to a set of numbers.
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Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. He created a system of fingerprint identification, which he termed dactyloscopy.
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Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. He created a system of fingerprint identification, which he termed dactyloscopy.
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Human blood grouping, ABO, discovered by Karl Landsteiner and adapted for use on bloodstains by Dieter Max Richter.
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NY state prison system implemented fingerprint identification.
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Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish first study on hair, including microscopic studies from most animals. First legal case ever involving hair also took place following this study.
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Victor Balthazard realizes that tools used to make gun barrels never leave the same markings, and individual gun barrels leave identifying grooves on each bullet fired through it. He developed several methods of matching bullets to guns via photography.
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First police crime lab established in Los Angeles.
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First police crime lab established in Los Angeles.
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Prototype polygraph, which was invented by John Larson in 1921, developed for use in police stations.
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Prototype polygraph, which was invented by John Larson in 1921, developed for use in police stations.
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FBI establishes its own crime laboratory, now one of the foremost crime labs in the world. This same year, a chair of legal medicine at Harvard was established.
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A sound spectrograph discovered to be able to record voices. Voiceprints began to be used in investigations and as court evidence from recordings of phones, answering machines, or tape recorders.
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A sound spectrograph discovered to be able to record voices. Voiceprints began to be used in investigations and as court evidence from recordings of phones, answering machines, or tape recorders.
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FBI established the National Crime Information Center, a computerized national filing system on wanted people, stolen vehicles, weapons, etc.
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Tommy Lee Andrews convicted of a series of sexual assaults, using DNA profiling.
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Britain's Forensic Science Service develops online footwear coding and detection system. This helps police to identify footwear marks quickly.
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A way for scientists to visualize fingerprints even after the print has been removed is developed, relating to how fingerprints can corrode metal surfaces.
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Michigan state university develops software that automatically matches hand-drawn facial sketches to mug shots stored in databases.