Free Unfair by Adam Benforado Page A

doubt.”But the judge was less sure: “Whether the prisoner was insane or not he could not tell.”
    In this context, it’s easy to see the appeal of tools, practices, and rules of thumb that promise to expose what is hidden: the true cause of behavior, proof of guilt, or a corrupted soul. The “trial by ordeal” described at the beginning of this book was just such a mechanism. It made interior evil manifest. A heretic might claim innocence, but submersion in water revealed the truth.
    Of course, we have not always needed elaborate rituals to unmask criminality. Indeed, for most of history, we’ve relied on nothing more than our own eyes.We all have intuitions about what criminal faces, postures, and behaviors look like. And we employ them every day, as we decide whether to count our change, how to respond if someone cuts in line, and when to cross the street as we walk home. As you gazed on the four accused New Zealanders, these unconscious associations were guiding your choice. We really do judge books by their covers—although it may be hard to articulate exactly what it is that we see and why it seems to point to criminality. “He just looks like a rapist,” we say, as if that explained everything.
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    The idea that a person’s facial traits offer a window into his character dates back to antiquity, but it was not until the nineteenth century that “physiognomy” was developed and organized to understand crime. To contemporaries, it felt like a moment of true revolution, a time to shed myths and backward practices.The message in the wind was that the world could be classified and explained, and that scientific and technological advances could be employed to improve society.Darwin, Edison, and Daguerre had shown the way. If the curve of a finch’s beak revealed its preference for a particular type of seed, why shouldn’t the slope of a man’s nose reveal his inner motives, good or bad? And if someone could design a machine to accurately compare noses, what was to stop society from creating a classification system for criminals? Eliminating crime seemed a real possibility.
    One of those swept up in the bluster of excitement was a professor at the University of Turin, Cesare Lombroso, who had previously been the director of the mental asylum in Pesaro.The Lombrosians were convinced that through a scientific approach, the origins of any criminal act could be identified.They were particularly interested in the possibility that those who committed crimes might be biologically different from the rest of the population.
    One of Lombroso’s epiphanies came during the autopsy of a notorious criminal, in which he was struck by how similar the anatomy of the head before him resembled a “savage” or “ape”: “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.” Here before him on the table was an explanation for the plague of crime.Those among us who seemed to have “an irresistible craving for evil for its own sake,” who sought to “extinguish life,” who were sexually depraved, or whose “excessive idleness” led to fraud and theft, were different in mind and body.They were “born criminals”—more like animals, for which these actions were normal.In order to identify those “degenerates” predisposed to engage in delinquent behavior, one had only to identify their bodily anomalies—“the stigmata,” in Lombroso’s words—that revealed a reversion back to a less evolved, animalistic state. It was not an entirely new notion—others had considered the connection between men and beasts centuries earlier (as the seventeenth-century woodcut on this page suggests), but Lombroso brought a rigor and focus to the endeavor.He and his followers set about carefully identifying and