Massacre of the innocents

‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves.

‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. With that terrifying and depressing thought, the fin-de- siècle criminologist Jean-Alexandre-Eugène Lacassagne summed up his views at the end of his long career. A hundred years later, they are still worthy of attention, for Lacassagne was, perhaps, one of the greatest pioneers of forensic science and medical jurisprudence in his century or any other.

It was he who discovered that bullets show markings that identify the weapons that fired them; he who set out the stages at which bodies putrefy; he who demonstrated how bruising showed that a body had been moved after death. The only man who challenged his pre-eminence in his day (and who was ultimately proved to be the lesser scientist) was the Italian, Cesare Lombroso.