F is for Firearms and Fingerprints

Firearms

District of Columbia v. Heller
[June 26, 2008, decision 5-4]

The District of Columbia Code made it illegal to carry an unregistered firearm, and prohibited the registration of “handguns”, though the chief of police could issue one-year licenses for handguns. The Code also required owners of firearms to keep them unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or other similar device.

Dick Anthony Heller was a D.C. special police officer who was authorized to carry a handgun while on duty. He applied for a one-year license for a handgun he wished to keep at home, but his application was denied. Heller sued the District of Columbia, arguing that the D.C. Code violated his Second Amendment right to keep a functional firearm in his home without a license.

The Supreme Court reasoned that “the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”

The Court held that banning handguns, an entire class of arms that is commonly used for protection and self-defense purposes, and prohibiting firearms from being ready and available in the home [not disassembled or with a trigger lock], the area traditionally in need of protection, violates the Second Amendment.

Fingerprints

Back around 2000 BC, Babylonians placed fingerprints on contracts to help prevent forgery.

In more modern times - while working for the Central Police Department in La Plata, Argentina, Juan Vucetich created the world’s first fingerprint classification system.  This system was based on early experiments by English scientist Sir Francis Galton.  Vucetich referred to his system as “comparative dactyloscopy,” and he used it in 1892 to identify a bloody fingerprint found at the scene of a gruesome double-murder of two children. The children’s mother admitted to the killings after she was presented with the evidence against her.

In 1892, Vucetich’s system identified 101 different fingerprint patterns. Today, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) is considered the largest biometric identification system in the world.  It includes the fingerprints of more than 103 million US residents and 73,000 known and suspected terrorists from around the world.

https://www.fbi.gov/services/records-management/foipa/privacy-impact-assessments/iafis

BONUS TOPIC - DNA

In September 1984, University of Leicester geneticist Dr. Alec Jeffreys found what he called “a horrible, smudgy, blurry mess” on a slide containing biological material. After studying it closer, he identified a family group in the sample and realized he could distinguish all three members of the family by a simple pattern of inheritance. Jeffreys first used the technique in April 1985 to solve a complex immigration issue that ultimately reunited a young boy from Ghana with his family in England. In 1986, Jeffreys used DNA to arrest and convict a suspect who raped and murdered two schoolgirls three years apart.

As of December 2012, the National DNA Index (NDIS) contains more than 10 million offender profiles, 1.3 million arrestee profiles and 467,000 forensic profiles. The primary metric used to determine the effectiveness of the NDIS is the number of investigations the database has helped. As of December 2012, the Combined DNA Index System (Codis) has produced more than 198,000 hits and assisted in 190,500 investigations.


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