2015/04/10
The Washington Post April 8, 2015: A bite mark matching advocacy group just conducted a study that discredits bite mark evidence
In February, I posted a four-part series on the forensic speciality of bite mark analysis. The series looked at the history of the field, how it came to be accepted by the courts as scientific evidence despite the lack of any real scientific research to support its basic assumptions, the innocent people who have been convicted based on bite mark analysis and how the bite mark matchers, advocacy groups like the American Board of Forensic Odontology and their supporters have waged aggressive, sometimes highly personal campaigns to undermine the credibility of people who have raised concerns about all of this.
The series ran during the annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention in Orlando, Florida. That conference included a presentation by Adam Freeman, who sits on the executive board of the ABFO, and Iain Pretty, who is not a member of the ABFO, has been critical of bite mark analysis and chairs the AAFS committee on forensic odontology.* Freeman and Pretty were to present the results of a study they had designed with David Senn, another ABFO member and a proponent of bite mark analysis.**
Senn in fact was the main witness for New York County Assistant District Attorney Melissa Mourges during a 2013 evidentiary hearing on the scientific validity of bite mark analysis in State v. Dean. That hearing was the first to assess the science behind bite mark matching since the field came under fire in a landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences. Ultimately, Senn and Mourges prevailed. Judge Maxwell Wiley ruled that the evidence could be admitted at Clarence Dean’s trial. In fact, to date, every court to rule on the admissibility of bite mark analysis has allowed it to be used as evidence. This, despite an ever increasing number of wrongful convictions, wrongful arrests, and lack of scientific research to support the field, and a new body of research suggesting that its core assumptions are false. more