https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/courts-junk-science-forensics-evidence/677739/
But the Nevada decision the reader flagged for me was something different—and “frustrating” doesn’t quite capture what’s going on. Maddening is more like it, because in this case my work was used to justify an ongoing injustice.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve written at length about how, despite near-universal agreement in the scientific community that matching marks on human skin to a suspect’s teeth is forensic quackery, the courts have continued to allow this sort of analysis to be used in criminal trials. Dozens of people convicted or arrested because of this “science” have been exonerated.
The maddening part of the Nevada opinion, which came down in December 2022, is that the justices appeared to agree with what I’ve reported, and went on to argue that the defendant should have noticed my reporting years ago. Because he failed to do so then, he is prohibited from using it in his appeal now.
That’s all bad enough. Here’s the punch line: While the Nevada Supreme Court says that criminal defendants should have been aware of the reporting I and others were doing on bite-mark analysis back in the mid-2000s, some defendants did notice it then, and begged the courts to do something. The courts ignored them—including the Nevada Supreme Court.