“It’s garbage,” said Keith Harward, who spent 33 years in prison for rape and murder based on bite mark evidence before DNA exonerated him.
By Ken Dilanian and Michael Kosnar
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Four separate governmental scientific bodies have concluded that bite mark analysis has no basis in science. That includes the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which said in 2016 that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bitemark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bitemark.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the gold standard of measurement science, said in 2022 that bite mark forensics “lacks a sufficient scientific foundation” because “human dental patterns have not been shown to be unique at the individual level.”
One 2016 study found that self-described experts couldn’t distinguish between human and animal bite marks. Others have documented how marks in human skin change over time through healing or decomposition.
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