Is Silence Support for a Toothless Science*?
Bite mark examination has long been known to be a dodgy process. Since its heyday in the Ted Bundy case, bite mark examination has waned in support and is now considered unscientific (“junk science” is a phrase that’s tossed around too lightly nowadays). Many scientists, legal scholars, and odontologists have decried the continued use of bite mark examinations in criminal cases: The list is too long to go over here. Dozens of wrongful convictions based on bite mark examination have been brought to light. Mostly because of DNA’s ascendance in Forensic Land, bite mark examination has been found to have no scientific validity to back up the claims of its practitioners: “There is no proof that odontologists can either reliably identify a wound as a bite mark or reliably match an alleged bite mark to an alleged biter.”
If that’s the case, then why haven’t forensic science* professional organizations denounced it?
There’s No ‘There’ There
From a March 2023 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) interagency report that reviewed over 400 sources and input from workshops determined that there is:
…a lack of support for three key premises of the field:
human dentition is unique at the individual level,
this uniqueness can be accurately transferred to human skin, and
identifying characteristics can be accurately captured and interpreted by analysis techniques. Furthermore, our review noted a lack of consensus among practitioners on the interpretation of bitemark data.
The report found a lack of research into factors that would support the idea that human dental patterns as reflected in bitemarks are unique to individuals. Their review showed that the transfer of dental patterns to skin can be distorted because of skin’s elasticity and unevenness, as well as movement of both the biter and the victim. Bite marks from the same biter may not be consistent. And, importantly, bite mark examiners may not agree on the interpretation of a specific bite mark…they even disagree on whether an injury is a bite mark! If you can’t agree on what you’re looking at, maybe it’s time to hang up the lab coat.
As one vocal scientific critic has put it:
“The tide against its continued use can be summed up in succinct terms: A lack of valid evidence to support many of the assumptions and assertions made by forensic dentists during bite-mark comparisons. Error rates by forensic dentists are perhaps the highest of any forensic identification specialty still being practiced. Bitemark testimony has been introduced in criminal trials without any meaningful scientific validation.”
Why Stay Silent?
Professional associations are groups that seek to further a particular profession, the interests of individuals and organizations in that profession, and the public interest. In that vein, one might think that a forensic science* professional association would have no trouble speaking out against a method with the horrendous track record of bite mark examination. It has no scientific validity, no methodological support, and has been implicated in numerous wrongful convictions.
Forensic professional associations haven’t--to my knowledge--made statements denouncing bite mark analysis. One of the largest forensic professional associations even lists bite marks as part of its purview. The American Academy of Forensic Sciences has this on their website:
The main role of the forensic odontologist is to identify human remains. However, they also may be involved with …patterned injuries… evaluation of bitemarks (animal or human), the comparison with suspect dentitions…
With the weight of science against bite mark examination, why not make a statement against the use of bite mark examination as a valid forensic method? It’s well past time and it would show that forensic science* cares about science.