Forensics : Research suggests that bitemarks used to prosecute in child abuse cases have lower pattern details than those bites seen in wrongful convictions.

Prime example of forensic context bias in criminal justice. Has a connect with Shaken Baby Syndrome scientific myths having no supporting data. Its practitioners admit no cognitive biases exist and will not analyze their own casework. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

FORENSICS and LAW in FOCUS @ CSIDDS | News and Trends

(updated 2:16pm 7-17-2014)

Research on bitemark opinions: Bites on kids have lower pattern details than in bites used in wrongful convictions used by prosecutors. Authored by myself and Professor Iain Pretty. It was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2009. This article has an Impact Factor of 18 according to Google Scholar. Quite good for a dental article. The JFS has an Impact Factor of 1.244. The full article is available here. At the bottom of this page is a link to my lecture on this subject given at the AAFS meeting in 2008.

Here is the abstract:

Bitemark cases continue to raise controversy due to the degree of expert disagreement which is frequently seen. Using a case mix of 49 bitemark cases from 2000 to 2007 each injury was independently assessed for its forensic significance using a previously described bitemark severity scale. Following the assessment, the mean value…

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Dr. Michael Bowers is a long time forensic consultant in the US and international court systems.

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