Video Shows Disgraced Bite-Mark Forensic "Expert" Planting Fake Bite Marks On Victims

You have to just read and watch this.

And note a Content Warning, particularly for the the second video, which features a dead little girl, aged around 6, dead by drowning; there is no gore, but a dead girl is itself very graphic.

It's a simple thing: A supposed expert on bite-marks "sees" bite marks no one else notices. Then, to "check" if the invisible bite marks match the dentistry of the alleged perp, he presses a mold of the perp's teeth into the victim's skin -- repeatedly, and hard.

He's not just bringing them close for inspection. He's jamming the dental mold into the skin.

Shockingly enough, after he does this 20 or so times, there is a perfect bite mark from the perp's teeth in the victim's skin.

West doesn't deny any of this. In his court testimony in the Stubbs case, and in a 2009 statement to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in response to the Duncan case, West claimed that this is simply how he identifies and matches bite marks.

"He says he's the only one who can see these marks," Bowers said. "And that when he pushes the cast into the skin, he says he's just enhancing marks that are already there." Of course, once West has altered the marks in the skin with a cast of the suspect's teeth, he has not only made the marks conform to the cast, he has also altered them so that no other expert can then second guess him as to whether they were bite marks in the first place.

What?

Now he's been disgraced, but many states continue to cling to convictions based partly or largely on this Frame-hanger's fake bite marks.

I'm a law and order guy, but law and order means not jailing people who are innocent, or who, at least, have convictions based on illegal fabricated non-evidence.

Vacate the convictions. Yes, it will be expensive to re-try the defendants. But the state needs an incentive to police its own work, doesn't it?

And then there is that little matter of the good chance these people are innocent, if that matters at all.

Some will say "But they're probably guilty." If there was good evidence they were guilty, why did prosecutors bring in Doctor Dracula to plant bite marks on the bodies?

You can infer these cases were weak by the dangerous means used to make them appear to be stronger.

Via Instapundit, with his own thoughts.

posted by Ace at 04:11 PM

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