It used to be a lot easier to get away with murder. And not that long ago, either. In fact, someone had to be pretty darn careless not to go undetected.
There weren’t cameras everywhere. No one had phones in their pockets. We didn’t have a network of computers connecting the world in seconds flat. And forensic medicine sure wasn’t as advanced as it is today.
Take, for instance, the FBI, established in 1908. They didn’t have a “crime lab” until 1932. So, it took them 24 years to decide what is now referred to as the “FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory.”
It was a big bunch of nothing when it started out. The lab was initially operated out of a single room in Washington, D.C., and had only one full-time employee. Poor guy. His name was Agent Charles Appel.
Good old Agent Appel began with a borrowed microscope and another device called a helixometer. The helixometer is a pseudo-scientific device, and it purportedly assisted with gun barrel examinations. They say it was more for show than anything else.
That J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was a character to behold. Yet, as far as the crime lab went, he provided very few resources and used the “cutting-edge lab” primarily as a public relations tool. Little by little, they began to build their techniques. But by 1938, the FBI lab added polygraph machines. Their lie detector tests were controversial at the time, but they became a part of the investigations.
At any rate, getting away with murder or anything else? In its early days, the FBI Crime Lab worked on about 200 pieces of evidence each year. So imagine what the rest of the police departments were doing. Not much. Things have picked up since then. Currently, the FBI Crime Lab obtains hundreds of new pieces of criminal evidence each day.
Crimes like The Boston Strangler, The Axeman of New Orleans, The Mad Gassers of Virginia and Illinois, The Servant Girl Annihilator, Lizzie Borden Murders, and on, all unsolved. (Well, technically, they figured out the Boston Strangler through DNA in 2013. A little late.)
Back in those early days, evidence was rare. And now that I think of it, a good many of the “convictions” were probably construed. I bet a lot of people sat in prison or went to the electric chair for crimes they didn’t commit. I think a lot of those convictions were placed on minorities or poor people.
But our numbers in the United States are staggering. This was taken directly from Wikipedia crime statistics:
In 2016, there were an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes committed in the United States. Over the course of that year, U.S. law enforcement agencies made approximately 10.7 million arrests, excluding arrests for traffic violations. In that year, approximately 2.3 million people were incarcerated in jail or prison.
That’s a lot of evidence gathering.
I’ve read that the rate of wrongful convictions in the United States is estimated to be somewhere between 2 percent and 10 percent. That sounds incredible to me. If that number is applied to an estimated prison population of 2.3 million, the numbers become staggering. It would mean there are between 46,000 to 230,000 innocent people locked away.
This also means that 230,000 guilty people got away with their crimes.
After all this, maybe it’s still easy to get away with murder.
Posted after publication: I just read that Brandon Bernard, died by lethal injection in a federal prison Thursday evening, despite eleventh-hour attempts for court intervention. This is yet another facet of our legal system and one to address in another column, sometime in the future.
===========
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle
===========
“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle
==========
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
― Noam Chomsky
=========
