MEASURING BODIES 169... a large picture of a woman tattooed upon his breast, with the words,
"Remembrance of Celina Laura" (his wife), and on his arm the picture of
a girl. He had an epileptic aunt and an insane cousin, and investigation
showed that he was a gambler and an idler. In every way, then, biology
furnished in this case indications which, joined with the other evidence,
would have been enough to convict him in a country less tender toward
criminals. Notwithstanding this he was acquitted (1911, p. 437).
You win some, you lose some. (Ironically, it was the conservative
rather than the liberal nature of jurisprudence that limited Lom-
broso's influence. Most judges and lawyers simply couldn't bear the
idea of quantitative science intruding into their ancient domain.
They didn't know that Lombrosian criminal anthropology was a
pseudo-science, but rejected it as an unwarranted transgression of
a study fully legitimate in its own domain. Lombroso's French critics,
with their emphasis on the social causes of crime, also helped to
halt the Lombrosian tide—for they, Manouvrier and Topinard in
particular, could parry numbers with him.)
In discussing capital punishment, Lombroso and his disciples
emphasized their conviction that born criminals transgress by
nature. "Atavism shows us the inefficacy of punishment for born
criminals and why it is that they inevitably have periodic relapses
into crime" (Lombroso, 1911, p. 369). "Theoretical ethics passes
over these diseased brains, as oil does over marble, without pene-
trating it" (Lombroso, 1895, p. 58).
Ferri stated in 1897 that, in opposition to many other schools
of thought, criminal anthropologists of Lombrosian persuasion
were unanimous in declaring the death penalty legitimate (1897,
pp. 238-240). Lombroso wrote (1911, p. 447): "There exists, it is
true, a group of criminals, born for evil, against whom all social
cures break as against a rock—a fact which compels us to eliminate
them completely, even by death." His friend the philosopher Hip-
polyte Taine wrote even more dramatically:
You have shown us fierce and lubricious orang-utans with human
faces. It is evident that as such they cannot act otherwise. If they ravish,
steal, and kill, it is by virtue of their own nature and their past, but there
s all the more reason for destroying them when it has been proved that
they will always remain orang-utans (quoted favorably in Lombroso, 1911,
P- 428).
Ferri himself invoked Darwinian theory as a cosmic justification
capital punishment (1897, pp. 239-240):