Agatha Christie: a look Into Criminal Procedure and Gender
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| Science and Technology One large difference between criminal procedure of Christie’s time and that of modern day America is the use of science and technology. As Brookman et al. writes that the investigators they interviewed said, scientific evidence brought with it a certainty that other evidence lacked, and this in turn helped them to close cases (161). Modern day investigators are able to pursue offenders using DNA profiling, ballistic imaging, mobile telephone tracking and analysis, and other forensic tools (Brookman et al. 152). This is miles ahead of what Poirot and Marple were working with. Poirot occasionally will make references to dusting for fingerprints, as in The Murder on the Orient Express, he goes over the crime scene, more specifically the window frame by blowing powder over it that he kept in his pocket (62). This is about the only scientific evidence that could immediately link a suspect to a crime scene. Miss Marple completely avoids the scientific path, choosing to focus on the strengths being a Victorian grants her. The closest she gets to DNA is in The Body in the Library when she notices that the nails of the body in the library could not be that of Ruby Keene. One might like to think that the lack of technology available to Poirot and Marple actually makes them proficient detectives. 61 While, Poirot and Marple would both clear most of their in today’s society, the same success is not guaranteed at an actual trial. Poirot is likely to have more success than Miss Marple. In all of the novels, Poirot is able to obtain a confession from the offender or offenders. With the exception to Curtain, he also has witnesses to these confessions. The confession, however, would not standalone under the corpus delicti rule, which does not allow extrajudicial confessions, or confessions made outside of the courtroom, to standalone. That being said, Poirot is also able to find enough evidence to logically place his murderer at the crime scene, with a weapon and with a body. Having a body present at the scene of the crime is one of the most vital criteria forgetting a murder conviction at trial. If Poirot was trying his in Nebraska, for example, for murder in the first degree, according to Nebraska Revised Statute 280-303, he would need to prove there was malice and a requisite mental state. The criminals in Murder on the Orient Express will never seethe courtroom because Poirot let them go, but it is likely he would have been able to prove that both actus reus, or malice, and mens rea, or the requisite mental state, existed. Poirot undoubtedly would have been able to do the same for Franklin Clarke. Curtain is probably the only novel being examined that would never have seen a criminal conviction. This is why Poirot kills Norton himself. All Poirot would have been able to prove in a court of law is, “It means that where X was present, crimes took place – but X did not actively take part in these crimes…the perfect criminal” (Curtain 203). It is fitting that Poirot’s last case is one that he could never prove in court. Miss Marple, on the other hand, would most likely have a hard time trying to prove her cases in court. As she mainly relies on her feminine intuition to guide her to the answer, her tangible proof is almost nonexistent. She would be hard pressed to prove receive a guilty 62 conviction for first degree murder off of just her gut feeling. However, she might be able to prove attempted first degree murder. Again, looking at Nebraska’s statute, The statutory elements of attempted first degree murder area substantial step in a course of conduct intended to culminate in the commission of a purposeful, malicious, premeditated killing of another person (State v. Al-Zubaidy, 253 Neb. 357, 570 N.W.2d 713 (1997)). This is especially true in The Body in the Library and A Caribbean Mystery, where Miss Marple catches the offenders in the act of trying to commit another murder. The attempted murder charge may lead to the investigation of the criminals involvement in the other deaths in the novels. |