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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Ed Pilkington

A bite mark, a forensic dentist, a murder: how junk science ruins innocent lives

Experts say there are tens of thousands of people in the US who have been falsely convicted with the help of junk forensic ‘science’.
Experts say there are tens of thousands of people in the US who have been falsely convicted with the help of junk forensic ‘science’. Illustration: Klawe Rzeczy/The Guardian

Charles McCrory is haunted by a memory from his 1985 trial in which he was accused of murdering his wife, Julie Bonds, in a bloody attack at their home in Andalusia, a small town in deepest Alabama.

What haunts him is the look on the jurors’ faces as they listened to the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, a dentist named Richard Souviron. He was a founding father of a cutting-edge branch of forensic science known as bite-mark analysis, which claimed to be able to identify violent criminals by matching their unique dental patterns to the bite wounds on victims’ bodies.

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