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U.S. Mississippi Death Row Case Faults Bite-Mark Forensics

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SEPT. 15, 2014

NEW YORK TIMES

In one of the country’s first nationally televised criminal trials, of the smirking serial murderer Ted Bundy in Florida in 1979, jurors and viewers alike were transfixed as dental experts showed how Mr. Bundy’s crooked teeth resembled a bite on a 20-year-old victim.

Mr. Bundy was found guilty and the obscure field of “forensic dentistry” won a place in the public imagination.

Since then, expert testimony matching body wounds with the dentition of the accused has played a role in hundreds of murder and rape cases, sometimes helping to put defendants on death row.

But over this same period, mounting evidence has shown that matching body wounds to a suspect’s dentition is prone to bias and unreliable…..

The lack of a scientific basis for bite-mark identification was stressed by the National Academy of Sciences in a 2009 report on forensics. The academy said that such analysis could not reliably identify one individual, among all others, as the source of a bite.

Bite marks on the skin change over time and are easily distorted, the academy said, while there is a huge potential for bias when an expert is asked to match a bite wound with the teeth of a known suspect.

Dr. Peter W. Loomis, a consultant in dental forensics in Albuquerque and president of the discipline’s professional body, the American Board of Forensic Odontology, did not dispute the academy’s conclusions but said that bite-mark analysis still had a useful role in court.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/us/mississippi-death-row-appeal-highlights-shortcomings-of-bite-mark-identifications.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&_r=0



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