Speaker 1: Imagine this. You're at your house. You're standing at the
Speaker 1: stove making dinner. You hear a knock at the door.
Speaker 1: It's the police. They ask you your name. They've been
Speaker 1: looking for you. The first thing you think is, oh, no,
Speaker 1: something must have happened to a friend or someone in
Speaker 1: my family. An officer looks you in the eye. They
Speaker 1: need to ask you some questions. What is it? What happened?
Speaker 1: They won't tell you. You'll need to go down to
Speaker 1: the police station. You agree to go with them, and
Speaker 1: you ask them over and over what's the problem. You're
Speaker 1: putting a small windowless room and you're very anxious, and
Speaker 1: you're told you wait here. Two plainclothes detectives eventually come in.
Speaker 1: One sits across from you. A rickety table separates you
Speaker 1: from him. The other comes to your side of the table,
Speaker 1: and he sits so close to you that is, he
Speaker 1: is touching yours. He quickly begins accusing you of raping
Speaker 1: and murdering someone. He says a name that you recognize.
Speaker 1: It's your ex who you haven't been in contact with
Speaker 1: for years. The one sitting closest to you tells you
Speaker 1: the murder happened last night and that the only way
Speaker 1: you can help yourself is to just admit what you did.
Speaker 1: He asked you where you were yesterday. At first, it's
Speaker 1: not easy to remember the mundane details of the past day.
Speaker 1: You were just told that your ex was murdered. But
Speaker 1: you take a deep breath and you try to focus.
Speaker 1: You were at work all day. On your way home,
Speaker 1: you went to the grocery store. Then you stopped and
Speaker 1: had a bureau with some friends at a local bar.
Speaker 1: Then you got gas at the gas station. You ran
Speaker 1: into one of your neighbors. You can remember sitting there
Speaker 1: across from those detectives, at least nine alibi witnesses. You
Speaker 1: tell this to the detectives, and this it's to them
Speaker 1: even more pissed. They say, look, we don't believe you.
Speaker 1: We know you killed this woman. They tell you that
Speaker 1: the victim has bite marks all over her neck, on
Speaker 1: her shoulder, her inner thigh, and her arm. They tell
Speaker 1: you that the killer left those bite marks, that they
Speaker 1: can determine who committed this crime just by taking a
Speaker 1: dental impression of their teeth and matching it to the
Speaker 1: bite marks on the victim. And if you're so innocent,
Speaker 1: they say, if this is some big mix up and
Speaker 1: you didn't really do this. Let us just take an
Speaker 1: impression of your teeth. Fine, let's do it. After more
Speaker 1: forceful accusations, they let you sit there, and sit there,
Speaker 1: and sit there. A few hours later, they send a
Speaker 1: man into the room wearing a white lab coat, and
Speaker 1: he certainly looks the part of a dentist. He takes
Speaker 1: out two metal bite plates and fills them with a
Speaker 1: silly putty like substance. He pushes these cold rays into
Speaker 1: your mouth and tells you to bite down. The putty
Speaker 1: taste like plastic. It hugs your teeth, then quickly firms
Speaker 1: up and drives. Then it's pulled from your mouth, and
Speaker 1: there is a perfect impression. The cops come back in
Speaker 1: and they tell you you can leave the police station,
Speaker 1: but they also tell you you're not to leave town.
Speaker 1: Three sleepless nights later, you're at your house, laying awake
Speaker 1: in bed, and you're really overcome by anxiety. You're wondering,
Speaker 1: do I need an attorney or does that make it
Speaker 1: look like I may have actually done something wrong? How
Speaker 1: do I act? What am I supposed to do? And
Speaker 1: then your dog starts barking. This time they don't knock.
Speaker 1: Your front door is blown off its hinges by a
Speaker 1: swat team, and before you know what's happening, you're on
Speaker 1: the ground. You can clearly hear one of these cops
Speaker 1: yell at you don't fucking move. Your face is being
Speaker 1: pushed into the carpet. You're being handcuffed. You're told you're
Speaker 1: being charged with the rape and murder of your ex
Speaker 1: who you haven't seen or spoken to in years. At
Speaker 1: your trial, the prosecution gets two experts and bite marks,
Speaker 1: called odentologists, an impressive sounding title for a forensic dentist,
Speaker 1: and they explain how the ridges, angles, peaks, and valleys
Speaker 1: of your teeth, these unique characteristics, perfectly matched with the
Speaker 1: bite marks on the victim. They say things to the
Speaker 1: jury that sound really impressive. There's a one in a
Speaker 1: million chance that these bite marks are anyone else's but
Speaker 1: the defendants, they say, and we know that to a
Speaker 1: degree of scientific certainty. The jury seems to be completely
Speaker 1: buying this, and why not? It all sounds so rational,
Speaker 1: so infallible. You're thinking, I'm really screwed here, but you
Speaker 1: know you're innocent. Countless innocent men and women have lived
Speaker 1: this horrific nightmare. They're Wrongful convictions are based on evidence
Speaker 1: presented by odentologists, the quote unquote scientific experts and bite
Speaker 1: mark evidence. I'm Josh Duben, civil rights and criminal defense
Speaker 1: attorney and innocence ambassador to the Innocence Project in New York.
Speaker 1: Today on wrongful conviction junk science, We're going to explore
Speaker 1: bite mark evidence. Like other forms of junk science used
Speaker 1: in criminal trials, bite mark evidence does not benefit crime
Speaker 1: victims or their loved ones, So why is it treated
Speaker 1: like credible science. It turns out that the charade of
Speaker 1: bite mark evidence is actually older than the United States.
Speaker 1: On April two, a reverend by the name of George
Speaker 1: Burrows was arrested and accused of torturing young women into witchcraft.
Speaker 1: It was alleged that he would inflict various forms of
Speaker 1: physical harm on them, pinching, strangling, and yes, biting them.
Speaker 1: The evidence against Burrows was really thin, but the only
Speaker 1: physical evidence were the alleged bite marks that the prosecution
Speaker 1: claimed his teeth left on the flesh of his victims.
Speaker 1: At his trial, Reverend Burrows was pulled by the face
Speaker 1: around the courtroom and his mouth was pride open. A
Speaker 1: stick was used to point out the unique characteristics of
Speaker 1: burrows teeth, the peaks, the angles of his molders, and
Speaker 1: then they were compared to what the court was told
Speaker 1: were bite marks on the young girls. Burrows was convicted
Speaker 1: and publicly hanged. While he stood on a ladder waiting
Speaker 1: the tightening of a noose around his neck, he prayed.
Speaker 1: He recited the Lord's prayer, and a collective gasp, like
Speaker 1: a creeping wave, rolled through the crowd that had gathered
Speaker 1: to watch his hanging. Because the Lord's prayer was considered
Speaker 1: impossible for a witch, and so bite mark evidence was born.
Speaker 1: In the bloodthirsty hysteria of the Salem witch trials, Burrow's
Speaker 1: recitation of the Lord's Prayer should have been a sign
Speaker 1: that something was wrong with his conviction, that he wasn't
Speaker 1: a witch after all, Because it turns out the angry,
Speaker 1: frenzied mob that was so quick to accuse, convict, and
Speaker 1: hang George Burrows had in fact executed an innocent man.
Speaker 1: Twenty years after he was put to death, George Burrows
Speaker 1: was declared innocent. He was in another town altogether, on
Speaker 1: the nights that the victims were allegedly tortured. George Burrows
Speaker 1: hadn't bitten anyone at all. That entire show that was
Speaker 1: put on in that courtroom, the circus of forcing his
Speaker 1: mouth open was nothing more than performance masquerading as science.
Speaker 1: And yet bite mark evidence is still being used in
Speaker 1: courtrooms across the country to convict innocent people of crimes
Speaker 1: they did not commit. Every single case that my department
Speaker 1: has gotten involved in has ended up in reversal of
Speaker 1: the conviction, or exclusion of the evidence, or withdrawal of
Speaker 1: the evidence because it's so grossly unreliable. To tell us
Speaker 1: more about bite mark evidence, we have Chris Fabricaun from
Speaker 1: the Innocence Project here with us today. Throughout his twenty
Speaker 1: year legal career, Chris has worked on countless cases in
Speaker 1: which innocent men and women spent decades in prison because
Speaker 1: of bite mark evidence. We at the Innocence Project had
Speaker 1: an agenda about eliminating the use of bite mark evidence
Speaker 1: in criminal trials. Chris, there's a case from the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the People Versus Marks, which I believe is the first
Speaker 1: modern instance of a bite mark on human skin being
Speaker 1: presented as evidence. Can you tell us about this case? So,
Speaker 1: Walter Marks was a weekend tenant of a woman named
Speaker 1: Lovey Brazonski, and so the first time since he had
Speaker 1: had this lease, he did not spend the night on
Speaker 1: the weekend, and that same weekend the murder victim turned
Speaker 1: up dead. Police discovered the body on Sunday afternoon, and
Speaker 1: they noticed that the victims nose had been indelicately put
Speaker 1: bitten off, and the cartilage of the nose on the
Speaker 1: victim's face had left the impression of what appeared to
Speaker 1: be tooth marks. Mr Marks looked good for it, but
Speaker 1: there wasn't really any evidence apart from the fact that
Speaker 1: he didn't show up for his usual weekends stay. So
Speaker 1: there was a group of dentists who had had some
Speaker 1: history with theifying human bodies through dental records, which is
Speaker 1: a totally different, unrelated subdiscipline of forensic dentistry, but they
Speaker 1: had had some interest in bite mark evidence and had
Speaker 1: been kind of looking for the right case to essentially
Speaker 1: try this out. And interestingly, Mr Mark spent four months
Speaker 1: in jail on a contempt charge resisting the cord order
Speaker 1: to have a mold taken of his teeth. Eventually he
Speaker 1: gave up and allowed the mold to be taken no,
Speaker 1: let me stop you. There didn't like six or eight
Speaker 1: weeks pass before they were able to compare the impression
Speaker 1: on Walter Mark's teeth to the victim. And hadn't she
Speaker 1: already been buried and they had to exhume her body. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know what's interesting about that is that they still
Speaker 1: do exclamations and do that type of pattern matching today.
Speaker 1: Doesn't common sense just dictate that when you bury a
Speaker 1: human body, the skin changes, it starts to wear, decompose.
Speaker 1: It just seems like intuitive that if there was a
Speaker 1: bite mark and you actually could compare teeth to it,
Speaker 1: that it wouldn't be you know, worth anything to make
Speaker 1: that comparison after a body had been buried for that long. Yeah,
Speaker 1: precisely right. You're asking the critical questions that no court
Speaker 1: in the country asked for forty years, state after state
Speaker 1: after state after state sited back to the Walter Mark's
Speaker 1: decision as evidence of not just that it's a missibility,
Speaker 1: but if it's scientific reliability, this becomes the precedent, This
Speaker 1: becomes well, hey, bite mark evidence was accepted in the
Speaker 1: Marks case, you should accept it here. And all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it just starts to get accepted. How is
Speaker 1: that even possible? Because it worked. You know, the criminal
Speaker 1: justice system is an efficient eating and killing machine of
Speaker 1: largely poor people of color, and whatever facilitates that process,
Speaker 1: it's going to be used as long as courts admitted
Speaker 1: and bite mark evidence was introduced as evidence the core,
Speaker 1: it admitted it, it got upheld on appeal, so it
Speaker 1: was good to go. So bite mark evidence was officially
Speaker 1: accepted in the Marks case, and now it has been ingested,
Speaker 1: if you will, into the criminal justice system. But it
Speaker 1: became acceptable to the general public because of the Ted
Speaker 1: Bundy case, right, Yeah, you know. I mean I sometimes
Speaker 1: say that Ted Bundy ended up having many more posthumous
Speaker 1: victims than any other serial killer that we can be
Speaker 1: aware of, because that his trial led to the widespread
Speaker 1: use of bite mark evidence all over the country. So
Speaker 1: for those of our listeners who don't know, but I
Speaker 1: feel like it's safe to say, most dude, Ted Bundy
Speaker 1: was one of the most infamous serial killers in US history,
Speaker 1: and his murder trial was actually the first criminal trial
Speaker 1: to ever be televised in the United States. Now, there
Speaker 1: was overwhelming evidence that proved Bundy was guilty of killing, raping,
Speaker 1: and torturing these young women from Florida State University, and
Speaker 1: they had witness testimony of him, you know, coming to
Speaker 1: the murder scene, leaving the murder scene. They had things
Speaker 1: that he had stolen from the homes of these women,
Speaker 1: and there was sort of like a belts and suspenders
Speaker 1: moment where they wanted to make sure they did everything
Speaker 1: they could to prove his guilt. And they spent two
Speaker 1: full days presenting this bite mark testimony in the case.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that it is, Chris, People are
Speaker 1: hungry for every piece of news they could possibly get
Speaker 1: about Ted Bundy. Everybody believed he is guilty. The only
Speaker 1: physical evidence in that case was the bite mark, so
Speaker 1: it was touted as you know, bite marks are the
Speaker 1: thing that finally brought Bundy down. And after Ted Bundy
Speaker 1: um was convicted and using bite mark evidence, it really
Speaker 1: just exploded all over the country. There's something about teeth
Speaker 1: and dentists that gets associated with reliability, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've all heard about dental records being used to identify
Speaker 1: crime victims accident victims, and that sign seems to be real.
Speaker 1: But that's very different from saying that a bite mark
Speaker 1: can be used to identify the person that did the
Speaker 1: biting right. The identification of human remains through dental records
Speaker 1: is kind of a trojan horse for the forensic dentistry
Speaker 1: crowd to get into court on bite mark evidence, and
Speaker 1: I've seen it firsthand in lots of dentists. Conflating these
Speaker 1: two subdisciplines is the same thing. You identify people by
Speaker 1: their teeth, and you identify people by the bite marks
Speaker 1: those teeth make, And that kind of makes sense until
Speaker 1: you actually think about it. The two techniques have nothing
Speaker 1: whatsoever to do with each other. So why doesn't bite
Speaker 1: mark evidence work? Why isn't it reliable? Bite marks are
Speaker 1: totally different because you're interpreting an injury on skin that
Speaker 1: has almost nothing to do with teeth at all. And
Speaker 1: so all of the little individual theoretically unique differences and
Speaker 1: teeth that you're pointing out, the cracks, the bevels, the
Speaker 1: crookedness or the straightness or the missing tooth, or this
Speaker 1: or that that you can think of that would be
Speaker 1: different from mouth to mouth or not reflected in the
Speaker 1: skin whatsoever. But even if you can say with some
Speaker 1: confidence that these two things can be associated, then you
Speaker 1: have to answer the question, is it one intent or
Speaker 1: is it one in ten million people that might also match.
Speaker 1: So in d NA, we know you know fairly well
Speaker 1: how many other people are likely to share your DNA.
Speaker 1: We've done the statistical population frequencies to know and to
Speaker 1: believe that the human DNA is unique. We haven't done
Speaker 1: that with fingerprints or shoes, or tires or firearms, and
Speaker 1: we certainly have not done with teeth. So you're saying
Speaker 1: that a bite mark and a suspect's tooth might appear
Speaker 1: to match, but many other people's teeth might match that
Speaker 1: same bite mark, so it's not a unique match, right,
Speaker 1: So you layer those problems on top of bite marks
Speaker 1: where you're trying to interpret an injury and human skin
Speaker 1: where all skin is different, right, old people, young people,
Speaker 1: thin people, heavy people, All these things make a difference
Speaker 1: in individual skin characteristics. If you're flexing at the time
Speaker 1: you're a bitten, the bite mark is gonna look one way.
Speaker 1: If your if your arm was relaxed at the same time,
Speaker 1: it would look a different way. Right, And if you
Speaker 1: think about somebody who may be lost a hundred pounds
Speaker 1: recently and has saggy skin as a result, right, the
Speaker 1: way the bite mark is going to appear on that
Speaker 1: person is going to be different than somebody who's you know,
Speaker 1: puffy from drinking right and their skins all taught and round,
Speaker 1: you know, and you try and bite into that and
Speaker 1: you're just gonna engage a few teeth. So every time
Speaker 1: that the same teeth make a bite mark, it's gonna
Speaker 1: look different every single time, depending on the angle of
Speaker 1: the body, what type of struggle was, what type of
Speaker 1: person that you're dealing with. All of these things are variable.
Speaker 1: Is that change every single time. So it's just fundamental speculation,
Speaker 1: you know, just guess work that's proffered as science. Very
Speaker 1: very persuasive, but totally guesswork. I read that someone can
Speaker 1: be missing their front teeth bite down on human skin,
Speaker 1: and the bite mark can make it appears if they
Speaker 1: actually have two front teeth, and that someone with two
Speaker 1: front teeth that are fully intact and bite down and
Speaker 1: the bite mark can look like they are missing two
Speaker 1: front teeth can really get the skin to say anything
Speaker 1: that you needed to say. You can match a bite
Speaker 1: mark to almost any suspect. But if this evidence is
Speaker 1: so unreliable, then what exactly makes these odentologists these bite
Speaker 1: mark experts so convincing that they're able to convince a
Speaker 1: judge or a jury of an innocent person's guilt. So
Speaker 1: you'll see these experts that are testifying in using a
Speaker 1: lot of scientific terminology plus a lot of obscure dental terminology,
Speaker 1: and the testimony just becomes opaque and you just kind
Speaker 1: of turn off your brain and your critical thinking. And
Speaker 1: the experts sounds so persuasive because they have ten thousand
Speaker 1: different ways to record a bite mark. Some of them
Speaker 1: go so far as harvesting tissue they call it from
Speaker 1: dead bodies and mounting them on silicone rings. And they
Speaker 1: use ultra violet photography and digital photography and black and
Speaker 1: white photography, and they use very very precise dental molds,
Speaker 1: and they use dental materials that that are highly highly accurate.
Speaker 1: All that's very impressive. It's just totally meaningless. There's massive
Speaker 1: distinction between collecting data and interpreting data, and what a
Speaker 1: lot of junk science relies on very very precise and
Speaker 1: impressive methods of collecting data and very very light on
Speaker 1: interpreting the data. And so the evidence of these so
Speaker 1: called expert odentologists sound strong because of all the jargon
Speaker 1: and technology, and in our society we're told to trust
Speaker 1: people in white lab codes. And these guys, these odentologists,
Speaker 1: really do appear to be experts. When an expert witness
Speaker 1: gets understand, they don't just start testifying. Right, what's the
Speaker 1: first thing that they do? Right? You go through their
Speaker 1: credentials cvs that are over twenty pages long, appearances on
Speaker 1: sixty minutes, presentations at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences,
Speaker 1: this board membership, that board membership. The credentials are off
Speaker 1: the chain, right, So the jury hears all of these
Speaker 1: impressive credentials, and why should they dispute it? And suddenly
Speaker 1: they start believing that these so called experts must know
Speaker 1: what they're talking about, that they're presenting solid scientific fact.
Speaker 1: It would take the very very critical thinker and independent
Speaker 1: thinker not to be lulled into a a sense of,
Speaker 1: you know, abdicating your responsibility. And there's always two strikes
Speaker 1: against any defendant that walks into criminal court and and
Speaker 1: is on trial. You know, most of the people in
Speaker 1: the courtroom believe that he or she is guilty already.
Speaker 1: The bias that most Americans walk into court with with
Speaker 1: the idea that the person that is on trial is
Speaker 1: guilty as charged. Chris, I've heard of so many convictions
Speaker 1: where bite mark evidence was used to gain the conviction
Speaker 1: and it was later proven that the injuries weren't even
Speaker 1: human bites at all. They were things like insect bites
Speaker 1: and animal bites or you know, bruises, something else entirely.
Speaker 1: One of the fundamental claims by bite mark experts, these
Speaker 1: forensic dentists, is that they, through their training and experience,
Speaker 1: have the ability to discern human bite mark from other
Speaker 1: types of injuries. We hand say in science is that
Speaker 1: if experts look at the same evidence and largely come
Speaker 1: two similar or the same conclusions, there's some reliability in
Speaker 1: the technique. And there was a study that was done
Speaker 1: about four years ago, and what this was was a
Speaker 1: survey of the self identified top forensic dentists in the
Speaker 1: country is about forty of them, and they did a
Speaker 1: survey of a hundred different injuries and they wanted to
Speaker 1: see if they're inter radar reliability. So when a bunch
Speaker 1: of odentologists looked at different kinds of injuries, did they
Speaker 1: agree about whether or not they were looking at photographs
Speaker 1: of human bite marks? These top bite mark experts in
Speaker 1: the country. They were all over the place. So even
Speaker 1: just as a threshold matter, as we're talking about what's
Speaker 1: a bite mark and what isn't a bite mark, it's
Speaker 1: junk science at that level too. This study should have
Speaker 1: been the end of bite mark evidence in courtrooms in
Speaker 1: this country, right, I mean, why wasn't it? It depends
Speaker 1: on really, you know, do you want the cynical answer
Speaker 1: or do you want the long term answer. The answer
Speaker 1: is that courts don't care. Any tool that is used
Speaker 1: successfully to prosecute indigent defendants in our criminal justice system
Speaker 1: is almost always going to be available to the prosecution
Speaker 1: and continue to be available to the prosecution once it's
Speaker 1: become admissible in the first place, and it's almost impossible
Speaker 1: to unwind it and to walk back all that legal precedents.
Speaker 1: The prosecutors have a duty to do justice, and that
Speaker 1: part of that should be never using unreliable evidence in
Speaker 1: the case. But that's not the way it's done. Once
Speaker 1: it's admissible, the prosecutors are going to continue to fight
Speaker 1: for its admissibility because it's useful to get convictions. The
Speaker 1: prosecutor who says, you know what, I feel uncomfortable presenting
Speaker 1: a case that is built on junk science is unfortunately
Speaker 1: the exception to the rule, and a very rare exception
Speaker 1: at that. And I think what our listeners need to
Speaker 1: understand is that prosecutors are often told go get a
Speaker 1: convey action, and what matters to them is the win,
Speaker 1: and the mentality is when at all costs, even if
Speaker 1: it means presenting information that is known to be unscientific, unreliable, unsubstantiated,
Speaker 1: including bite mark evidence. At the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 1: I asked you to imagine yourself accused of a murder.
Speaker 1: The victim had bite marks all over their body. The
Speaker 1: prosecution brought out a parade of experts. They presented what
Speaker 1: sounded like unimpeachable scientific fact. You're sitting there knowing that
Speaker 1: you're innocent, Yet these so called facts about bite marks
Speaker 1: are being used to turn a jury against you. The
Speaker 1: suppose spurts are still being used to wrongly convict people
Speaker 1: all over the country. There are people sitting on death
Speaker 1: row right now whose cases are based on the junk
Speaker 1: signs of bite mark evidence. The good news is that
Speaker 1: lawyers like Chris Fabricon are working with the Innocence Project
Speaker 1: to overturned cases that are based on bite mark evidence.
Speaker 1: Our objectives were was to eliminate the use of bite
Speaker 1: mark evidence generally, which you know, sadly we still have
Speaker 1: an accomplished that goal, but also to find the many,
Speaker 1: many victims of this junk science and that are still
Speaker 1: incarcerated around the country. You know, we still have five
Speaker 1: different cases that we're working on right now with people
Speaker 1: that are in prison and on death row. We have
Speaker 1: two death row clients in one UM case that's about
Speaker 1: to go to trial, in another capital case in Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: that's also you know, you're trying to use bite mark evidence.
Speaker 1: The wheels of justice grind slowly, but there is hope
Speaker 1: Chris's attempt to eliminate bite mark evidence from our criminal
Speaker 1: justice system is indeed paying off. One of Chris's clients,
Speaker 1: Sheila Denton, who was wrongfully convicted based on bite mark evidence,
Speaker 1: was released from prison this past April. Sheila Denton was
Speaker 1: convicted fifteen years ago for the homicide of a jard
Speaker 1: dealer in Georgia. The state's theory was that Sheila Denton,
Speaker 1: who's you know, weighed in and about a hundred and
Speaker 1: ten hundred fifteen pounds had manually strangled this crack dealer
Speaker 1: was maybe about a hundred and eighty pound man, and
Speaker 1: there was an injury on her arm, and there was
Speaker 1: an injury on the victim's arm. The forensic dentists in
Speaker 1: the case, a guy named Tom David, said it was
Speaker 1: probable that Sheila Denton had bitten the victim, and it
Speaker 1: was also probable that the victim had bitten Sheila Denton,
Speaker 1: and that was essentially the only evidence in the case.
Speaker 1: So Sheila Denton was fairly quickly convicted. But when the
Speaker 1: case was overturned, Chris was able to convince not only
Speaker 1: the judge but also the odentologists who testified for the prosecution,
Speaker 1: that bite mark evidence is nothing but junk science. You know.
Speaker 1: For an expert who drank the kool aid for many
Speaker 1: years and has been declared an expert witness in courts
Speaker 1: around the country and takes a lot of personal and
Speaker 1: professional pride in the forensic odentology practice, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean In busting bad guys aspect of their civic duties,
Speaker 1: to come to the realization that they were wrong, that
Speaker 1: everything that they had talked about, everything that they believed in,
Speaker 1: was bullshit. That's very, very powerful, and you need more
Speaker 1: of that in forensics. You might be wondering how you
Speaker 1: can help besides being a more critical and informed journe
Speaker 1: The Innocence Projects Policy Department works in all fifty states.
Speaker 1: The past laws the facilitate releasing innocent people from prison
Speaker 1: and preventing wrong ful convictions. Sign up for their newsletter
Speaker 1: so you can see the policies that are being proposed
Speaker 1: in your community. There's an expression that I like to
Speaker 1: use in wrongful incarceration cases, which is that pressure breaks pipes.
Speaker 1: These exonerations don't come easy. They're usually the result of
Speaker 1: a grueling fight, and your voice matters. What I mean
Speaker 1: by that is make noise about the junk science of
Speaker 1: bite mark evidence. Write a letter to your local criminal
Speaker 1: court judges about how inaccurate it is, Send them articles
Speaker 1: about its flaws. Right and op ed. Judges are human,
Speaker 1: They can be persuaded, and you have the power to
Speaker 1: help change their minds by speaking up. You have learned
Speaker 1: from this episode how dangerous one case, one legal precedent
Speaker 1: can be in infecting our system of justice with junk science.
Speaker 1: All it takes is one more to write that wrong
Speaker 1: and if you wind up as a juror in a
Speaker 1: criminal case and you find yourself presented with something that
Speaker 1: is touted as science. Ask tough questions of your fellow
Speaker 1: jurors when you're deliberating. Approach it with a healthy degree
Speaker 1: of skepticism. Demand answers to tough questions. If something doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense, Give the defendant the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1: After all, isn't that what the presumption of innocence is
Speaker 1: all about. If you do that, if you demand real
Speaker 1: proof beyond a reasonable doubt and it doesn't meet that standard,
Speaker 1: you might just prevent the next wrongful conviction. Okay. Next week,
Speaker 1: we'll explore the junk science of blood spatter analysis with
Speaker 1: award winning journalist Pamela Koloff from Pro Publica and The
Speaker 1: New York Times. Pam has written extensively about this kind
Speaker 1: of evidence. As part of her research, she actually became
Speaker 1: him a certified blood spatter analyst. Wrongful Conviction Jung Science
Speaker 1: is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
Speaker 1: with Signal Company Number One. Thanks to our executive producer
Speaker 1: Jason Flom and the team, it's Signal Company number One
Speaker 1: Executive producer Kevin Wardis and senior producers Karen Cornhaber and
Speaker 1: Brit Spangler. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You
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