Bitemark Experts Agree, Bitemark Evidence Isn’t Reliable

Admittedly that’s a bit over an over­state­ment for a arti­cle title, but it gets the read­ers atten­tion. A recent study at the University of Buffalo have con­cluded that bitemark evi­dence can’t be linked back to a given indi­vid­ual. Bitemark evi­dence can cer­tainly be used to exclude and include a sus­pect, but to go any fur­ther than that is a stretch.

In antic­i­pa­tion of the NAS report, the new UB [University of Buffalo] study pub­lished in the Journal of Forensic Sciences chal­lenges the com­monly held belief that every bitemark can be per­pe­tra­tor identified.

“Bitemark iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is not as reli­able as DNA iden­ti­fi­ca­tion,” explains the study’s lead author Raymond G. Miller, D.D.S., UB clin­i­cal asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of oral diag­nos­tic sciences.

“With DNA, the prob­a­bil­ity of an indi­vid­ual not match­ing another can be cal­cu­lated,” he says. “In bitemark analy­sis, there have been few stud­ies that looked at how many people’s teeth could have made the bite.”

Bitemark evi­dence has been ques­tioned in this blog before, specif­i­cally in an arti­cle by Popular Mechanics related to the NAS report, and the arti­cle on recent con­gres­sional hear­ings.

The the whole arti­cle on the University of Buffalo study here.