Despite the popularity of cop shows about investigators bringing criminals to justice based on a few fingernail clippings and a dropped tissue, the track record of forensic evidence is spotty at best. Critics, including Reason journalists, have shown that too much crime-stopper "science" resembles tea-leaf reading more than it does the efforts of Sherlock Holmes.
Now a federal agency says that bitemark analysis, something of a poster child for bad forensic technique, is every bit as sketchy as skeptics claim.
