Yet the
tendency to slander in hysterical cases, which M. Ceneri urged so
eloquently in a celebrated trial or the tendency to untruth in
children, which M. Motet has ably illustrated, are but manifest
and simple examples of this applicability of normal, criminal, and
pathological psychology to the credibility of witnesses. And,
under its influence, how much of the clear atmosphere of humanity
will stimulate our courts of justice, which are still too much
isolated from the world and from human life, where, nevertheless,
prisoners and witnesses come, and too often come again, living
phantoms whom the judges know not, and only see confusedly through
the thick mist of legal maxims, and articles of the code, and
criminal procedure.
Apart from these examples, which prove the importance of what M.
Sarraute justly called ``judicial applications of criminal
sociology,'' the fundamental reform needed in the scientific
preparation of criminal evidence is the creation of
magisterial experts in every court of preliminary inquiry. In a
question of forgery, poisoning, or abortion, the judge has
recourse to experts in handwriting, chemistry, or obstetrics; but
beyond these technical, special, and less frequent cases, in every
criminal trial the basis of inquiry is or ought to be formed by
the data of criminal biology, psychology, and psycho-pathology.
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