Faulty Forensics:
Spotlight on
Bite Mark Analysis

Bite mark analysis has never been validated.

Cartoon illustration of a wide-open mouth showing upper and lower teeth with pink gums.

Like many other faulty forensic sciences, there are no standards required for bite mark evidence to be used in court.

Without scientific standards, it takes almost nothing for so-called “experts in the field” to introduce incorrect bite mark evidence that may help convict innocent people. A 2009 National Academy of Sciences report even declared that error rates in bite mark analysis were high enough that the discipline should be phased out of use in a judicial setting if new standards were not developed immediately.

Colorful puzzle pieces fitting together to form a square.

The amount of factors that affect what bite marks look like make them almost impossible to match.

Bite mark matching isn't as simple as merely finding what set of teeth look similar to the imprint.

Different factors such as the elasticity of the skin, the amount of pressure applied during the bite, how easily a particular person bruises, and many more mean that the same mouth may make a vastly different mark depending on the circumstances.

“Bite mark analysis has never been validated but continues to be used in courts today.”

Error rates in bite mark identification are alarmingly high.

An American Board of Forensic Odontology report found that experts could rarely agree on whether certain marks were human bitemarks, let alone whether they belonged to the same person. In fact, only a little over a third of experts correctly matched the marks on any one occasion.

63.5%

Gary Cifizzari was wrongfully convicted in Massachusetts in 1984 for the murder of his great aunt. Dr. Stanley Schwartz compared Gary’s bitemark impressions to the mark on the victim’s body and determined them to be a match. Gary denied any involvement in the crime but was convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

In 2017, the New England Innocence Project took on Gary’s case and in 2018 post-conviction DNA testing was conducted on items of remaining evidence. The results excluded Gary from the evidence at the crime scene. CIFS submitted a joint amicus brief with the Innocence Project of New York in 2019 to raise the issues surrounding bitemark evidence. Gary was fully exonerated in December, 2019 after nearly 35 years in prison.

To learn more about bite mark evidence, watch our video on the subject.

Bite mark Case Study:
Gary Cifazzari

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