Path To Forensics

Edmond Locard brought several contributions to modern criminalistics, but one of the most important ones is Locard’s Exchange Principle.  This principle states that anyone who comes into contact with the crime scene will bring something new to it and take something away from it. Locard’s work and research in the areas of death, injury and criminal investigation lead to a form of legal medicine which involved many people such as physicians, statisticians, anthropologists, and mathematicians to contribute to police cases by being able to classify and identify various aspects that they had not been able to before.

This paved way for forensic science. Locard made a name for himself when he helped the police solve a case that the police were stumped by, he helped the police get a confession out of counterfeiters due to their clothing have particles that compare to the coins. He also helped the police solve who killed a young lady.

Hans Gross coined the term criminalistics.

He is considered the ‘father of criminal profiling’ and wrote a book called Handbook for Examining Magistrates as a System of Criminology which talked about how lawyers, legal investigators, and jurist need to be able to understand criminalistics. Gross believed the only way of ridding the legal system of ‘bias and misunderstanding’ was to incorporate criminalistics into the justice system. Gross unknowingly created the earliest from what is now known today as forensic science. He unified the scientific aspect of solving a crime with the legal aspect. Gross also ‘applied medical science and rigor into criminalistics’ and pushed for uniformity within processing the crime.

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Gross also progressed the field of microscopy which ‘applied the advances of the microscope in medicine to criminalistics.

Gross, Locard, Bertillon, Lacassagne, and Lombroso all had huge impacts on what is known today as modern criminalistics. They each gave the head start that pathed way for how we do things now. Lombroso made us ask the question whether it was nature that made a criminal. Lacassagne made us ask the question, whether it was nurture if society made a criminal. Bertillon made way pathed way for the modern-day mugshots. Locard gave us his exchange principle which states that ever criminal leaves something behind at the crime scene and will take something from it. Gross pathed way to modern forensic science and coined the term for criminalistics.