207 the idea that the fundamental changes in criminal law taking place in the 1800s can be seen to correspond to the essential transformations in the field of the law of proof. Correspondence and parallel development do not, however, mean that the development in one field “explains” or “required” a change in the other as well. What it does mean is that common reasons lie behind both phenomena: as with the emergence of classical criminal law, the substitution of free evaluation of evidence for the statutory theory of proof can be understood as another facet of the nineteenth-centurv liberal bureaucratic state. The Development of Criminalistics: Better Techniques, Better Evidence? In addition to its effect on many other sciences, the nineteenth century is generally considered to have been of path-breaking importance to the development of scientific criminalistics. The evolution of modern criminalistics has been associated with the development of criminality itself, the proletarization of the working class, urban growth, and the development of police criminal investigation departments as well as the techniques of criminal investigation. Furthermore, the development of empirical sciences, such as forensic medicine, chemistry, physics, biology and psychology, came to influence criminalistics a great deal.* It has been suggested by some researchers that the development of criminalistics served as a significant background factor to the rise of free evaluation of evidence. Gro£ and Geerds suggest that the abolition of torture led to a “scientificization” {Verwissenschaftlichung) of the lawof proof and, consequently, to a relative strengthening of witness and expert evidence-; Hietaniemi links the emergence of free evaluation of evidence in Finland to the simultaneous development of criminalistic methods.^ Is there, thus, an intimate link between the two phenomena? Could the abolition of legal rules of proof even partly have resulted from the more advanced devices that crime investigators came to have at their disposal? To answer these questions, it is not necessary to go into the evolution of all the different empirical sciences related to criminal investigation here. Let us limit ourselves to just one important aspect: the foundation of an organized police force. Without an organized police force, techniques of criminal invest!- gation had little chance of prospering. In Finland, the first city police stations were founded rather early — in 1816 in Turku and 1826 in Helsinki. In the countryside, the corresponding tasks ’ Grois - Geerds 1977 pp. 52-54. On the history of criminology itself, see the articles in Rock - Grol5 - Geerds 1977 p. 52. ^ Hietaniemi 1995 pp. 15-16. 1994.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=