The Junk Science of Bite Marks Needs to Go Away

We’ve posted about bite mark junk science here before. See About Bite Mark Evidence – Forensic Odontology.

Now, a leading White House science advisor has exhorted the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to eliminate bite mark evidence, because there is, in fact, no science to it at all. See Radley Balko’s recent article in the Washington Post here.

Balko also correctly advocates in his article that we MUST get trial court judges out of the business of being the decision makers about what is, or is not, valid science. “If not a single court in the country to date has been able to rule against a self-evidently absurd field like bite mark matching, why should we continue to entrust the courts to arbitrate the scientific validity of other evidence?“