2018/11/07

Forensic Magazine November 4, 2018: Bite-mark Evidence on Skin Should Be ‘Deceased,’ Dentist Says

Thirty-one exonerations have come from a re-examination of cases based on the forensic comparison of bite marks.

The unsupported comparison of such bite marks left in human skin during rapes, murders and other violent attacks should be totally thrown out of forensic science, a dentist and researcher writes in the latest Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine.

While the reconsideration of bite-mark evidence has changed their general acceptance, the backlash against it should be even more complete, writes C. Michael Bowers, of the Ostrow School of Dentistry at the University of Southern California.

“It remains only for courts to view the accumulated disconfirming evidence on bitemark identification and the lack of supporting empirical evidence through the lenses of the law’s demanding standards,” writes Bowers. “When they do, bitemark identification will join the ranks of other deceased forensic science.”

Bite marks first became universally accepted after a 1974 murder of an elderly woman in her California home. She had been sexually assaulted with a knife, and had “an elliptical laceration of the nose” potentially coming from the killer’s teeth. But the analysis and comparison of the marks to the dental molds taken of Walter Edgar Marx was only completed after the victim’s body had been buried for nearly two months—and the remains were exhumed by court order. The evidence was upheld by state appeals courts—and it became the de-facto beginning of widespread use of bite-mark evidence in the United States, according to the new analysis. more