Bite mark analysis has no basis in science, government experts say. Yet there are still people in prison because of it.
Four governmental bodies have said bite mark analysis has no basis in science. Yet it's been used in many criminal cases, and no court has ruled it inadmissible.
Even now, as a free man, Keith Harward finds it hard to explain what it was like to sit in a courtroom, on trial for a rape and murder he knew he didn’t commit, watching someone considered an expert testify with certitude that bite marks on the victim’s leg matched his teeth.
“I still to this day wonder what the hell just went on,” he told NBC News at his home in North Carolina. “Sometimes I break down and bawl, because I can’t explain to you or anybody else, other than people who’ve been in my situation.”
No evidence connected Harward to the horrific 1982 crime, but he happened to be among a group of sailors from a Navy ship in dry dock in Newport News, Virginia, who were required to give dental impressions, since the assailant had been wearing a Navy uniform. Two forensic dentists told two separate juries that Harward’s teeth matched “to a scientific certainty” a bite mark on the rape victim’s skin. Harward spent 33 years in prison until, with the help of the Innocence Project, he was exonerated in 2016 by DNA evidence that pointed to another sailor as the killer.
Keith Harward talks to reporters as he is released from Nottoway Correctional Center in Burkeville, Va., on April 8, 2016.Daniel Sangjib Min / Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP fileThe Innocence Project says Harward is among at least 36 people who have been exonerated after having been wrongfully convicted based on now-debunked bite mark comparisons. One of them, Eddie Lee Howard, was on death row in Mississippi when he was freed in 2021 after crime scene DNA was matched to someone else.
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.”
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