Pedro Ramón Velásquez (1892)

For full points, address the key concepts, make specific comments on
the example in the case study, and add your own insightful comments.
Your response also needs to include factual support from the assigned
reading. The reading is pages 155-166. https://intervisualtechnology.us/uploads/PDFs/Fore…

To get a conviction, I would rather have one good
fingerprint than a pound of hair and fiber evidence. Do you agree or
disagree? Support your answer. Submit as a word document or PDF.

Pedro Ramón Velásquez (1892)

On June 29, 1892, in the village of Necochea, Buenos
Aires, two children, Ponciano Carballo Rojas, age six, and his sister
Teresa, age four, were found brutally murdered in their home. Their
mother, Francesca, age 27, was found with a superficial knife wound to
the throat. The police started an investigation that baffled them.
Francesca told police that her neighbor, Pedro Ramón Velásquez, had
committed the crime. Velasquez, a one-time suitor of Francesca’s, did
not confess, even after being tortured. Inspector Commissioner Alvárez
went to the crime scene to reexamine it, searching for any trace of
evidence that might have been overlooked. He spotted bloody fingerprints
on the doorpost of the house. Because Francesca had denied touching the
bodies of her children, Alvárez believed he had found an important
clue. He took the bloody doorpost and fingerprint samples of Pedro
Velásquez to Juan Vucetich, who in late 1891 had opened the first
fingerprint bureau in South America in Buenos Aires. Vucetich examined
the fingerprints and found they did not match. Alvárez became suspicious
of Francesca, who had been so insistent that Velásquez had committed
the crime. He took a sample of her fingerprints and discovered that they
matched the bloody prints found on the doorpost of the house. When
Francesca was confronted with the evidence against her, she confessed.
She had murdered her own children, faked an attack on herself, and cast
blame on an innocent man, intending him to die for the crime. Her
reasons for the murder and for blaming Velásquez were that he had
interfered in a romance between her and another suitor, and she felt she
would be more appealing to the other man if she did not have children.
Francesca Rojas was the first person in the Americas to be convicted of a
crime based on fingerprint evidence.