on 5 May 1905 at the Old Bailey. Trial When the Stratton brothers were brought to trial, MacNaghten, Collins, and Richard Muir, the prosecutor for the Crown, knew that they would face an uphill battle. Since the fingerprint was the only tangible evidence that they had, the case would stand or fall on that evidence, and the defence would try their best to undermine it. Fingerprinting pioneer Henry Faulds was a vocal detractor, because he had the mistaken notion that one fingerprint match was unreliable; thus the defence retained him as a witness. Also set to testify for the defence was Dr John George Garson, who advocated anthropometry over fingerprinting as a means of identification. Both men were professional rivals of Edward Henry, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who established the Fingerprint Bureau and was responsible for the acceptance of fingerprinting in the English legal system; he was also in attendance. The prosecution called over 40 witnesses to the stand. Muir and his team wanted to place the two defendants at the scene of the crime, and despite Muir's inherent distrust of eyewitness testimony, he was counting on their consistency to reinforce the fingerprint evidence. Although some of them like Henry Alfred Jennings, a local milkman, were not able to make a positive identification of the defendants despite being consistent in their general appearance, others like Henry Littlefield and Ellen Stanton were positive in their identification of Alfred Stratton. The Home Office pathologist who did the post-mortem on the Farrows told the court that the injuries on the Farrows were consistent with being inflicted by weapons similar to the tools that the brothers had in their possession. Kate Wade, Albert Stratton's girlfriend, testified that Albert was not with her during the night of the murder, and he usually stayed with her. In addition, Annie Cromarty, Alfred's girlfriend, testified that Alfred had come home on the morning of 27 March with a good amount of money without explaining where he obtained it; she also added that he threw out the clothes that he wore that day when he saw the newspaper accounts of the murder, and that Alfred asked her to tell the police, or anyone else who asked, that he was with her the night of the murder. However, the defense counsel, H.G. Rooth, Curtis Bennett and Harold Morris, were able to give plausible alternative explanations, which would tend