Your smile could cost you your freedom.
Just ask Crystal Weimer from Pennsylvania, or William Richards from California. Weimer and Richards don’t know each other, but their fates were eerily and tragically similar.
Both were tried and convicted of murder in unrelated cases. Both of their convictions were based on testimony by so-called bite mark experts, who claimed to have matched marks found on victims with each of the defendant’s “bite mark.” In both cases, the prosecution relied heavily on the "matching" bite marks as proof of the defendants’ guilt. In both cases, the bite mark evidence was just plain nonsense.
A new report released this week by the President’s Counsel of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), offered yet another devastating critique of bite mark evidence:
available scientific evidence strongly suggests that [bite mark] examiners not only cannot identify the source of bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bite mark. For these reasons, PCAST finds that bite mark analysis is far from meeting the scientific standards for foundational validity.
PCAST, an advisory group appointed by the President and made up of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers, suggested that bite mark analysis was unlikely to be “salvageable” as a forensic methodology and that scarce forensic resources should be devoted elsewhere.
The PCAST report adds to the chorus of experts that put bite mark evidence in the junk science category. In 2009, leading scientists from the National Academy of Sciences issued a report condemning bite mark evidence as highly unreliable.
But despite all the criticism from top-notch forensic experts, bite mark evidence has not been banned from the court room.
Which means that innocent people could wind up in prison for crimes they didn’t commit based on “science” that isn’t scientific at all.
In June, 2016, both Weimer and Richards were exonerated – just one day a part. As it turns out, the bite mark evidence that put them in prison was just plain wrong. Collectively, they spent nearly thirty years in prison.
And that is nothing to smile about.
This article first appeared on the Wrongful Convictions Blog.