Today’s story is a sad one, and it comes to us from 1948. England.
The actual date was today’s, May 14th, from a hospital, in Blackburn, England. There was a three-year-old little girl there, named June Devaney, and she was recovering from pneumonia. A nurse went in to check on her and discovered that she was missing.
Everyone alarmed, a search ensued, and two hours later the police found her body. She had died of multiple skull fractures. They determined that she had first been raped, and then swung headfirst into a wall. Again, she was three.
They only had two significant clues to go on. The first was a set of footprints that were on a newly cleaned floor in the children’s ward. The second was a water bottle on a nearby table that had been moved. There were many fingerprints on the bottle, and the police were able to match up all but one set.
They checked them against their criminal database. No match.
So next, the investigators fingerprinted over 2,000 people who had access to the hospital. Still, no match.
So, boldly, the Detective Inspector, named John Capstick, took it further. Capstick decided that every man in the town of Blackburn would be fingerprinted. There were more than 25,000 homes in that city. The police set out on this monumental task. They assured everyone that the prints would be destroyed after this investigation. It took them two months, and they collected over 40,000 sets of prints.
No match. But Capstick was determined.
They then checked against every kind of registry they could find for the city of Blackburn, and discover a few men had not provided fingerprints.
On August 11th, the police caught up with one of these guys. Peter Griffiths. His footprints matched the ones found at the scene. His fingerprints also came back a match from that water bottle. With the evidence against him, Griffiths confessed to this horrible crime. He blamed it on alcohol.
Griffiths was found guilty of murder and was executed on November 19, 1948.
Okay, a terrible story. But here is the thing that struck me about this account.
Going from home to home and fingerprinting 40,000 men, such as this, would be impossible in the United States where Fourth Amendment protections prevent searches without probable cause.
It would violate our rights as American citizens.
We are hearing a lot about that these days, now aren’t we?
But it brings up some important questions about our rights and our freedoms.
This killer would have gone scot-free for the murder, and rape, of a three-year-old little girl, had the police not surveyed for prints.
And now, people are demanding their rights to shop, and get their nails done, and drink at bars. But by doing so, they will likely cause the deaths of many other people. Are these felony murders? And in all the cases where other people just get sick and don’t die — cases of assault?
Where do one person’s freedoms stand, when they encroach on the freedoms of so many others? I cherish our rights. How far do they go? Should we ever be asked to suspend them? When a 3-year-old is raped and murdered? When thousands might die as a result of our actions?
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“Human rights’ are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in…A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals
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“Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”
― Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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“To say nothing is saying something. You must denounce things you are against or one might believe that you support things you really do not.”
― Germany Kent
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