From J. Karsch
by e-mail
I was at the Bite Mark Breakfast which Feedback found so amusing (31 May). It
was actually a fairly serious gathering, but (for reasons that were never
explained to me while I was in training), forensic pathologists like cute titles
for macabre presentations.
Sex attackers often leave bite marks on their victims, and the question then
arises of whether the marks can be linked to a specific person. In addition,
deciding whether bite marks found on a dead body were made by an animal on the
corpse, or by a human while the body was still alive, can be a vexing problem
for pathologists.
Even though bite-mark comparisons are admissible evidence in most countries,
the scientific underpinnings for these comparisons are quite thin, though they
are more substantial for bite marks than for other areas, such as tool markings
and signature comparisons.
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