Judgment by Blood

The only legally indisputable fact about the lawsuit which came before a New York Supreme Court justice in Brooklyn last week was that Betty Beuschel, onetime Long Island chambermaid, had a 2-year-old son. Miss Beuschel claimed that one Jacob Manowitz, Long Island real estate dealer, fathered her child, asked damages. He denied the charge and invoked the Landsteiner blood test to establish his disclaimer.

Ordering girl & child to give specimens of blood to match against the man's, the Brooklyn justice declared: "Research of medical journals and foreign law reports discloses that many thousands of similar cases have been before the courts of European nations. The Landsteiner blood grouping test is generally accepted by the medical profession. . . . Neither plaintiff nor child would, in the slightest degree, be injured."

This aspect of genetics was notably presented for court action a year ago in New Haven where a justice of the peace permitted Dr. Alexander S. Wiener, Brooklyn blood specialist, to perform the blood test. This test is the issue of the blood classifications which Dr. Karl Landsteiner of the Rockefeller Institute discovered when he was a young researcher in Vienna 30 years ago. There are four main classes of human blood (O, A, B and AB). If, for example, a woman whose blood was of type A had a child by a man of type A, the child's blood would be type A or O and could not be type B or AB. This meant, reasoned the Brooklyn blood expert, that the Landsteiner blood groups can show only that a man is not a child's father, and by a system of mathematical combinations, suffices to clear one out of six men falsely accused of fatherhood. If certain blood substances called agglutinogens M and N are also taken into consideration, the chances of disproving parenthood are one out of three.

When the young mother in New Haven heard this learned exposition about bloods, and saw the putative father cleared by the test, she withdrew her accusation instanter (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933). Thus the question of blood tests for paternity could not be appealed for a court of last resort to set a precedent.

In South Dakota last fortnight a Supreme Court for the first time in U. S. jurisprudence did pass on the question, but negatively. One Clement Damm denied that he had raped his adopted daughter, demanded use of blood tests as evidence. The trial court refused his request and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. The South Dakota Supreme Court affirmed the lower decision, though dissenting Justice S. C. Policy thought a blood test might have proved Damm innocent. Said Justice Dwight Campbell, after referring to TIME's account of the New Haven case: "It does not sufficiently appear ... as an unquestioned scientific fact, that if the blood groupings of the parents are known the blood grouping of the offspring can be necessarily determined, or that if the blood groupings of the mother and child are known . . . that the blood group of the father could not have been a certain specific characteristic group."

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