Behind the BastardsForensic Science is supposed to provide perfect certainty in the most serious criminal cases. What if it's all a bunch of bullshit? Robert sits down with Dr. Kaveh Hoda to talk about all the myriad cons in forensic "science.”
Also media. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast on the Internet that you're currently listening to unless you're one of those weird people who's like trying to trying to like maximize your intellectual benefit because you listen to too many weird YouTube grifters and you've got a different earbud to a different phone in each ear, and you're like double podcasting as you read a book because that's going to get you the most knowledge so that you can probably put a bunch of scam books up on Amazon or get into fucking, I don't know, real estate fraud. God, the Internet's a great place and one of the great things about the Internet is the guest we're bringing on today. And as a doctor obviously, doctor cave Joda has made a vow to first do no harm, which is weird because every time we have him on the show, he kills it.
Kava.
Welcome to the program was fantastic.
I know, I thought about the Woe this morning and I was just waiting to use it.
Goodness, I'm going to steal that another day. Working her fingers to the bone in the podcast Minds Good Buddies' Happy to be back. Thank you so much for having me.
Yes, yes, now, Cava. This is a coming during a difficult time. Actually wrote most of this episode in the bone marrow transplant ward and then the ICU that my dad was in as I was doing overnights watching him. And I have a question for you because the hospital I'm at, I'm not going to give the precise name, but I'm in North Texas. The hospital I'm at, and the bottom floor next to like one of the restaurants has an antique store. And this antique store is so crowded with stuff that you can barely walk in it. And the proprietor and only employee is a man who seems to be in his eighties. And where's at least as far as I can tell, only like three piece suits. And I'm is he the Is this the devil? I found the devil?
Wait?
Wait, wait, wait, hold on, let's let's back up just a moment. Because you said there is restaurants and an antique store.
There's an antique store in the hospital.
It's next to a sub hospital that.
Is next to a subway, so on in I know why you'd want a subway in a hospital, because what you need food at the hospital when you're watching.
Nothing nothing said says hospital ambiance, like expired lunch.
I don't understand.
I mean, my California mind cannot comprehend. I've never worked or been in a hospital in which there are more than I mean, there's a cafeteria, but not anything. I would say it's close to a restaurant, it's nothing like nothing that resembles an antique store maybe against ball. Why are you going to an antique store in the hospital. What is happenings?
I mentioned this too, why a doctor brother who practice I don't know it and he was like, he was like, oh yeah, And I was like, what do you mean?
Oh yeah, He's like why but why He.
Was not phrased by it, and I was like, this is I'm like, what is happening there anyway?
And yes it is the devil?
Yeah, there's there's no way. This is not a needful thing kind of situation here right right?
Yeah, don't there's some weird gin monkey paw think anything that person sells, don't buy it.
Because I've been talking to the nurses too, and every nurse I ask it is like, I have.
No fing idea.
It doesn't make any sense make any sense unless they built the hospital on the antique store and the antique store was like, YESO, the.
Antique store was there first.
They just had to put out house forever. It's been here forever.
Sometimes it's older than the hills themselves, right Cove. Yes, you're a scientist as a doctor scientist.
Yeah, sort of scientific method is something I understand.
Yeah, you utilize science, correct. What do you know? How do you feel about forensic science? You know, stuff like fingerprinting, you know, DNA analysis, that kind of jazz.
Will it is interesting. I feel like there are certain parts of it that are very interesting to me and seem to have, you know, some good evidence behind it, like toxicology, DNA stuff. I think we've gotten fairly good at that. That's a it's like a science. But I don't know. I mean a lot of it seems to me. Maybe you'll correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm guessing not because that's what the topic of the Today Show is. But I feel like just because you label something a science doesn't necessarily mean it's a science, like scientology for example. You know, so, I feel like there might be some parts of forensic science that are not Can I tell you a little bit of a backstory on this one?
Sure? Please? So when I was.
In medical school, I did my psychiatry rotation in a jail, so I actually did forensic psychiatry. And I sat down with a warden once who considered himself like a world expert. And there were a lot of great people that worked in the jill believe it or not, social workers and stuff I worked with that were amazing. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about this warden who who ran it, who was like an expert in like micro expressions.
Someone's line, it's my favorite cop bullshit science.
And I remember he.
Sad me down for like this lecture about it to like go over it and me it was like fun, I'm like, will this work? And I try, like if I look up into the left, does that mean the person's lying?
You know what I mean.
There's all these little tiny things I was looking for, But I'm like, I just I can't believe this is a real science. Someone would really need to convince me of the of the research behind it before I ever like allowed that in court. Not that I'm a judge or anything, but you know what I mean, that's so I'm torn on forensic science? Is the long is a short answer to that?
Yeah, I had a fucking cop and Brady Texas pull me over and repeatedly tell me as he was waiting for the dogs because I wouldn't let him search my car that, like, I've been trained to recognize lying, and I believe that you are lying because like you did this or did that when you say that you don't have any marijuana in the car, and they didn't have any marijuana in the car, but I still wasn't gonna let them fucking search me.
Yeah.
No, The best advice I ever got about being an adult was from my speech and debate coach who got fired because he had not disclosed that he had an arrest on his record or something right after this, but told us, if you ever have to lie to would judge, don't break eye contact. Just look a judge or a cop. Just look them right in the eye and tell them what they need to hear for you to go home. And by god, has it worked.
Yeah?
No, that's gotten me out of trouble a lot of times. But yes, as that as that introduction kind of makes it clear, there are sciences within forensics, like, for example, matching DNA. You know, if there's blood at the scene of a murder that does not belong to the victim, and then you find a person with an injury and their blood matches, that blood might suggest that they're the murder. Right, there's real science there. I don't think anyone would would argue with that. Likewise, you find some fingerprints at the scene on a murder weapon, they match another dude, you know, a person that you catch later, that might suggest that you know that person did the murder. However, while both of those things are sciences, both fingerprinting and DNA analysis do not work as well as people often believe, and there's kind of this whole field that's grown up around them because of how solid the actual scientific basis in both fingerprinting and DNA analysis is. They've provided sort of like an umbrella under which a lot of other or like a canopy under which like this kind of mushroom cloud of toxic fake forensic science has also grown up. I was mixing my metaphors there, but I think it's forgivable.
Yeah, yeah, I got it.
Anyway, that's what we're talking about today, because all forensic science is a bastard. That's not entirely true, but it's as true as forensic science is. So well, we'll allow you know. On May thirtieth, nineteen ninety seven, a Boston police officer entered the backyard of a house in Jamaica. Plane he engaged in a short struggle with an unknown person who ambushed the officer and managed to gain access to his service weapon. The assailant fired twice, wounding the officer, whose last words before losing consciousness probably sound in something like.
Oil you've Boston.
Sorry, sylthily what I wasn't gonna not gonna do my award winning Boston accents.
And the best part is I had no idea was coming that I know. Really, it was a sneak attacked.
I mean, we've all known Boston cops. They all sound like that when you get shot Henny Kenny. Anyway, he survives, so it's not in bad taste after shooting the officer the assailant, isn't it.
I'm not sure you're off the hook, but go on, I think I'm fine.
I'm letting you have this one. After it's been so long since I brought the Boston accent out the people have demanded. I did see like color go back into your cheeks when he said, you're like more a lot now than you were two minutes ago. Yeah, that's why I got into podcasting, is to do that Boston accent. We just got sidetracked by dictators. So after shooting this cop with his own gun, which has to be embarrassing as a cop, the assailant started shooting at a bystander who was standing by a second story window watching. Thankfully doesn't hit this random person, and then he flees the scene, leaving behind nothing but a baseball hat that was knocked off in the struggle. He breaks into a home near where the shooting had taken place because he was thirsty. A family is there and they like watch while he drinks a glass of water and then leaves the CoP's gun and sweatshirt behind. Now this seems like, well that's a lot of evidence. You shoul probably be able to track this guy down, right, A ton of witnesses leaves this sweatshirt behind. Yeah, anyway, it takes about two weeks for the injured officer to be well enough to sit in front of a photo array of suspects and like potentially identify somebody, and he picks a guy out of this lineup, a man named Stephen Cohens Cowa NS And he does this on two separate occasions, so the police think, well, that's probably a pretty good id. The person who had been shot at from his second floor idd Cohen's two. Now that sounds again. This is one of those things where if you see this in like a cop show, where you'd be like, well, then it's obviously him, right, he got id by both people at the scene. But here's the thing, and this is something I hope people are getting more aware of. Eyewitness accounts and identifications are garbage. They're oftentimes worse than nothing at all. People are terrible at recognizing shit that's had. I remember this one moment during the protests and where like somebody pulled a gun after like driving their car through a chunk of the protest, And the first thing I heard from like a bunch of different people was like a guy just pulled an AR fifteen and a bunch of protesters and I looked over to Garrison and I'll say, I'll bet you fucking anything it was a handgun. And as soon as pictures come out, so it's a nine millimeter handgun. And it's not people aren't trying to like be lie or fantasized. It's like memory is bad. We're bad remembering things that happened to us.
Yeah, I mean, I assume, especially when you're not expecting to, you know, memorize things when it just happens and like catching it and then looking back.
Yeah.
Yeah. And this is why when they train people to you know, do jobs, like you know whatever, FBI agents and stuff, there is training and like how to try and like analyze a scene. And and I think it's debatable as to how well that works, but it is a thing that you need to try and train because we're not naturally good at it. Now. Part of why I bring up the fact that these are terrible ideas is that both the you know, the cop is kind of ambushed. He doesn't get a good look at this guy who shoots him. He's ambushed and horribly injured. And the fam or and the guy who like looks at him from that second story window and then get shot at is not close to him, right. The two who identify Cohen's as the guy. The family in the house that the assailants forced their way into see this the assailant at close range, and they don't ID Cohens. Now, as a journalist, if I if I'm just trying to determine what i think is more credible, I'm going to be more credible to the family who.
Was right next to the guy and shot the guy in your living room, that that makes sense. You might be able to recognize that that's a decent ID. Probably right, Yeah, you have a better shot. You have a bear shot. Yeah, certainly so. The fact that these folks who had been closest to the shooter and spent the most time with him didn't id Cohen's should have been a warning. But their testimony is not what cinched Cohen's conviction, and he is convicted of this crime. Instead, prosecutors used a fingerprint found on the glass of water the assailant drank from it in their home. They bring in a fingerprint expert. He concludes the Layton print matches Cohen's left thumb, and that sounds pretty bulletproof. Right, fingerprints are real. Matching fingerprints is a real thing you can do. Seems like a good id. So Cohens goes off the prison where he's going to stay for more than six years. He does not accept this conviction because spoilers. He's innocent, so he fights this as much as he can from prison, and the Innocence Project worked with Cohens for several years, and in two thousand and three they succeeded in pushing the Suffolk Superior Court to release the glass mug that that latent fingerprint had been taken from swabs of the mug, the baseball hat, and the sweatshirt that the assailant had left behind to do DNA testing and see if any of it matched Cohen's and the DNA tests are conclusive. While the DNA on the hat matched the DNA from the swabs, so they knew that the hat that was left at the scene where the officer was shot belonged to the same person who drank from that mug, neither test matched Cohen's. Right yeah, tests on the sweatshirt reveal the same thing, and with this new evidence, the Suffolk DA reanalyzed the fingerprint match that had been used to convict Cohen's Upon re examination, it was concluded that the fingerprint was not left by Cohens. On January twenty third, two thousand and four, he was released. He lived in freedom for the next three years until he was shot to death in two thousand and seven in his own home.
A fright. A really depressing number of Innocence Project people who get like released die very soon after getting released for a variety of reasons. Inclaning, A lot of them, you know, go back into situations where their living situation isn't very safe. Yeah, because the time they've spent in prison certainly didn't give them the ability to get into a saber one exactly.
I mean it's also like they probably picked people who are at risk anyways, those are the people they are being accused of this, or people who probably aren't in a fantastic situation to begin with.
Then they go to.
Jail, they spend whatever amount of time not making money, earning an income, learning anything, advancing their lives, and then they have to try and start over. A lot of them are going to be much worse off. So yeah, yeah, I'm not shocked to hear that, I guess.
Yeah.
Now, Cohenes's story from the use of unreliable forensic science to convict him to his tragic early death after release is again very common and just as common as the fact that he was a black man, and the officer he was accused of wounding was white next to DNA, So.
I'm sorry that I didn't even have to ask his color. No you. Yeah, of course, figure that.
Was going to be the situation here, that they were gonna just find another guy that matched the color and that was it.
Yeah, it happens quite often now next to DNA testing. Fingerprint matching is one of the most reliable methods of forensic analysis we have. But that fact, which is undeniable, does not mean that it's reliable enough you would want to risk your freedom on it. It does not mean that it's perfect, and it doesn't mean that you can take an expert saying this fingerprint belongs to this person as red right.
None of that is.
You simply can't rely on any of that because there's a big difference between the actual science behind fingerprints and fingerprint forensic science.
Right.
Fingerprinting experts, prosecutors and law enforcement like to portray it as a thing of objective science where you get one hundred percent confirmation of a perpetrator's presence of a crime scene because you matched them to a fingerprint, and that is not true. Basically, everything you've ever heard about forensic science and fingerprint science is a lie. And outside of stuff like fingerprints and blood, which do at least have a basis in science, most of what is done in the forensic field, or at least a lot of it, has more in common with witchcraft than science. So I'm starting with fingerprinting both because people should know that it does not work the way they think it does, and because it kind of kickstarts the field of forensic science in the modern sense and in the US that starts in nineteen eleven when fingerprinting first is used in a court case. So unlike most of what we're talking today, again, this does have real use in catching people who have done bad things. The first case in which fingerprints were introduced as evidence was the nineteen to ten trial of Thomas Jennings, who was accused of murdering Clarence Hiller. And I'm going to quote now from an article by General Nuken in Issues in Science and Technology. Quote the defendant was linked to the crime by some suspicious, circumstantial evidence, but there was nothing definitive against him. However, the Hiller family had just finished painting their house and on the railing of their back porch. Four fingers of a left hand had been imprinted in the still wet paint. The prosecution wanted to introduce expert testimony, concluding that these fingerprints belonged to none other than Thomas Jennings. Four witnesses from various bureaus of identification testified for the prosecution, and all concluded that the fingerprints on the rail were made by the defendant's hand. The judge allowed their testimony and Jennings was convicted. The defendant argued unsuccessfully on appeal that the princes were improperly admitted, citing authorities such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and a treatise on Handwriting identification. The court emphasized that standard authorities on scientific subjects discussed the use of fingerprints as a system of identification, concluding that experience has shown it to be reliable, and you know, that's all good. This is probably a case of fingerprinting being used to actually, like convict a guy who did crime. You know, it's interesting to me that human beings have pretty much always known that there was potential in fingerprints as a method of identification. The idea that they are unique to each individual goes back very far. Ancient Babylonians used fingerprint indentations as part of their records for business transactions. Yeah, but fingerprinting didn't enter the criminal justice system in an organized way until the mid eighteen hundreds. Like most innovations in criminal justice, it was first tested by the British raj in India, initially as part of like a fraud prevention measure.
Right.
A major breakthrough came a few years later in the eighteen seventies, courtesy of a Scottish doctor, him Falds, who was a missionary in Japan. Falds started inking his coworker's fingerprints after noticing fingerprints trapped in two thousand year old pottery shirts. This led to the first recorded case of a solved crime due to fingerprints. One of his employees was stealing booze from the hospital and drinking it from a beaker. Falds found a print on the glass and matched it to the culprit. That is apparently the first time.
Crime whom's amongst us in medicine does not occasionally use a beaker for that purpose. Come on, yeah, it's a crime. Now, that's a crime.
It's bullshit, It's this is the first great injustice caused by finger printing exactly.
You know, it's interesting to hear this because it's like, you know, we talked about some of the forensic signed stuff before, like the stuff I'm a little more familiar with, like DNA and toxicology. The reason I know about those is because they're kind of born out of like research, out of like universities, hospitals, peer reviewed journals, et cetera. But like some of these other things seem like they're born out of like law enforcement, which is like a big difference. It feels like.
And fundamentally not scientific. And even when they're quote unquote using science, their goal is not scientific because it's always starting from a I there's a crime, and I need to identify who did it, and usually I think it, I know who did it, and I'm trying to find evidence to prove it. That's gonna be one of the recurrent problems in this field. Not with every case, but it's it's pretty frequent, so fouls. He's kind of like the first real like a person who's trying to study fingerprints like in an actual scientific measure, and he does some cool stuff. He like scrapes the ridges off of his fingertips and then waits for them to grow back, and fingerprints himself again to confirm that if you like fuck up your fingerprints, they grow back the same way. He's the guy who like found that children's fingerprints remain the same as they grow up. And in eighteen eighty he wrote a letter to the journal Nature and suggested that police should use fingerprints to identify suspects. And again this is not initially like a in order to catch them. It's more of like a when you have people arrested, we can do fingerprints and that can help us, like you know, sort through people. The idea, though, of using them as part of in like a forensic sense, starts to pick up steam, and in eighteen ninety two a eugenicist and scientists named Sir Francis Galton publishes a book called Fingerprints, which outlines the first attempt at a scientific classification of fingerprints based on patterns of arches, loops and whirls now. Around the same time, this French cop named Bertillon developed his own method of measuring people's bodies in order to identify criminals. And as you might have guessed, the science of fingerprinting has always been deeply tied to scientific racism, as these guys all believe that, like, criminals have physiological differences from law abiding citizens, right Bertolan's measuring people's bodies straight, Like, how can you tell from measurements if someone's going to commit crimes?
You know what does look like? Exactly?
Like these beliefs go hand in hand with the idea that some races are more inclined to criminality than others. But as is always the case with this kind of science, you have this mix of like stuff that's absolute races togwash, and actual science. And some of what they're doing and trying to like classify fingerprints is actual science and is rigorous. The classification system for fingerprints that wins out at the end of the nineteenth century is a modification of Galton's. It was tested by British police in India and adopted by Scotland yard in nineteen oh one. Fingerprints were accepted for the first time in English courts in nineteen oh two, and of course, the first recorded court case in the US using fingerprint evidence is like nineteen ten and nineteen eleven is previously discussed. By the mid century fingerprinting has cemented itself as the most scientific and unimpeachable tool for confirming guilt. A whole industry of experts grows up alongside the discipline, and hundreds of men and women begin to make their careers as experts on fingerprinting for the police and the court system. In case studies published in scientific journals and in statements to the mess these experts reinforced the idea that fingerprinting was a hard, objective science. Manuken writes, quote writers on fingerprinting routinely emphasized that fingerprint identification could not be erroneous, Unlike so much other expert evidence, which could be and generally was disputed by other qualified experts, fingerprint examiners seemed always to agree generally, the defendants and fingerprinting cases did not offer fingerprint experts of their own, Because no one challenged fingerprinting in court, either its theoretical foundations or, for the most part, the operation of the technique. In that particular instance, it seemed especially powerful. The idea that fingerprints could provide definite matches was not contested in court. In the early trials in which fingerprints were introduced, some defendants argued that fingerprinting was not a legitimate form of evidence, but typically defendants did not introduce fingerprint experts of their own fingerprinting, thus avoided the spectacle of clashing experts on both sides of a case whose contradictory testimony befuddled jurors and frustrated judges. And so you see why this is so powerful, Right, every other kind of expert you might bring into a court case, there could be a counter expert to say, here's another explanation. But if fingerprinting is a hard science, there can't be It's like DNA, right, you wouldn't have there can't be two opinions on whether or not someone's DNA matches right exactly.
Yeah.
No, I mean, like the if I have the facts right about the OJ Simpson case. That was part of the problem is that the defense never actually had their own DNA expert because I don't think they could find someone that would do it. But this is like, this is a major issue in general nowadays. Maybe forever you have someone who seems like a very authoritative figure, maybe they have some titles behind their name, they speak in a certain way. Listen to my podcast recent episode about Andrew Huberman, for example, and they seem like a very learned man of books and they can it's who's a jury to say at that point, Well, this person seems to know what they're saying. This person seems very worldly and intelligent, and they seem to be an expert, and they're they're the authority on it. So yeah, okay, yeah, obviously this is the person that did the crime.
Yeah, And that is like, that's what happens, right, And it's it's this kind of ce change in the way that the justice system works, because suddenly you have this thing that is in a total class of its own as far as evidence goes. Right, Now, here's the thing. Fingerprinting is not like DNA analysis and never and by the way, DNA analysis, while it is real and does work quite well, also isn't perfect. There are errors, people make mistakes, there are a mistaken you know that that is a thing that can happen. But it is an objective science, right, Like there's a lot of study on that. The fingerprints analysis is not an objective science in the way that you would consider anything from like medical science to be an objective science. One of the pieces of evidence for that is that there are no like from state to state, what counts as a fingerprint ID differs wildly, right. So there's a case Daubert that is kind of the case that currently establishes like what counts as science when you're like introducing expert evidence into court, right, And under the Daubert judgment, judges are supposed to examine whether or not, like judge, whether or not something can be admitted based on whether or not the expert evidence has been adequately tested, if it has a known error rate, and if there's standards and techniques that like control the operation right, subject to peer review, right, which sounds reasonable. But judges are not scientists, right, and they often mistake stuff that sounds like evidence of peer review but really isn't. And some of the evidence for this is that, like fingerprinting, examiners often use point counting, which is a method where you count the number of ridge characteristics on the prints in order to like say these are identical prints. But there is no nationally recognized fixed requirement for how many points of similarity are needed. Some states at six, some states it's nine, some states it's twelve. That's not science, yea.
And I'm so glad you brought up error rate studies. It's sort of like an important part of like determining if a test will be a good one or not, you know. And it feels like judges are not a lawyer, but it feels that judges are more likely to allow evidence to come in even if it's sort of questionable, because they're worried about maybe like excluding something that would be important, so they'll allow it to go in. Yeah, even if it's sort of like they don't understand the science. My guess is they would be more willing to allow it than to be strict about excluding it unless they understood the science really well.
Yeah, And the problem is that like all of these people have really impressive sounding credentials and they are a part of what appear to be scientific bodies, and in fact, in a lot of cases we'll talk about some of these organizations are bodies that a lot of what they do is scientific, but there's just not actually oversight, right, Like Minuchin sums up kind of the current state of how like messy as well. When they write local practices vary and no established minimum or norm exists. Others reject point counting for a more holistic approach. Either way, there are no generally agreed upon standards for determining precisely when to declare match. Although fingerprint experts insist that a qualified expert can infalliably know when two fingerprints match, there is in fact no carefully articulated protocol for ensuring that different experts reach the same conclusion. And that's a problem, right. It imagined if like cancer diagnosis worked this way, if like every hospital was like, well, this is what we consider cancers.
You know, I mean, you know.
Also part of the thing is this, to some degree, there is uncertainty in medicine. Like say, if you had a pathology report and you take a biopsy of something and sure all just looks at it.
They do have criteria.
They have to be like, okay, there're a certain amount of these types of cells I'm seeing and if there's a question, then they reach out to someone else to review it, and second, you know, and look over it.
But that is known to us. We're known.
They're like, okay, this is the degree of certainty we have here. It's not one hundred percent, but this is what we have. And sometimes that happens, so there's a transparency there that's important, you know what I mean.
And likewise, you know, there is a science within the approach of fingerprint analysis because people have fingerprints, and we know, you know, they're generally unique to each person, you know, based on the best data that we have. But these people are not getting up and saying, you know, based on this established, you know framework that is universally agreed upon, there's this percentage of likelihood that this is a yes, they're saying, I can tell as an expert, this is infalliably amassed.
Right, it's so much more valuable as an expert.
Right, right, Yeah, it's and it's messy. So fingerprinting takes off like and again, you know, the fact that this is really deeply flawed and fucks a lot of people over it doesn't mean that's what it does in the majority of cases. Right, I'm not saying that, I actually kind of suspected the majority of cases it's reasonably good, right, But that still leaves a lot of people to fall through the cracks and get their lives ruined by imperfect and badly applied scientific reasoning. There was no serious questioning of fingerprinting as a method of forensic science until the end of the twentieth century, when DNA profiling began to enter common use. This questioning started, ironically, with questions by defendants as to the legitimacy of DNA matches. Right, so, DNA evidence starts being introduced in court cases, and because the science is so new and is not as straightforward to understand as matching to fingerprints, there's a lot more debate and debate in court cases about what it means to match DNA samples and how likely it is that such matches might be made in error. And that kind of causes some people to go, did we ever subject fingerprinting to this level of scrutiny? Perhaps we should, We might want to look into this sum you know, because it hadn't had to answer these questions.
Right it was.
I mean not to say that Western medicine and universities and all the stuff I'm used to is like the end all be all, but because again, it didn't come out of those places where it was already a part of the process, you know, it was baked into it.
And by the way, it's good that DNA matching was subject to a lot of scrutiny. Everything should when people's lives are on the line exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, So the sheer act of publicly debating the matter brings new scrutiny to fingerprinting, and once DNA science was accepted because it is the best thing we've got, and that when it comes to this sort of stuff, it helps to ignite a new series of questions as to whether or not fingerprinting was as rock solid a discipline as its expert practitioners claimed. One of the first things you'll hear, and I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast has heard, the claim, no two people have the same fingerprints. Right now, how would you prove that?
I mean, I suppose you would have to do a ton of testing and you would have to test a bunch of people and see if there is any people that have the same one, and you'd have to have a pretty big n number of people involved in the study to prove it.
It doesn't really exist now. It is based on the sheer number of people who have been fingerprinted, very likely that fingerprints are unique. But this is just common wisdom that started being said. It isn't something that was introduced that people started claiming because they had done a big study. Right again, the sheer length of time that we have been doing finger printing. Pretty likely that this is the case, But it was not something people started saying because they had a good fucking reason to say it. It was something people started claiming as an advertising method, right, interesting, And the fact that it is likely true doesn't mean that that's not kind of sketchy, right, And we're dealing with people's lives again again, Yeah, exactly, Speaking of advertising and sketchy, it's about time. Yeah, this podcast is supported entirely by the concept of DNA. DNA, get some welding again, do be a silicon based life form? No, you're not gonna be one of those Like if you do get one of those like spit into a thing. M hm, oh, don't do those things people. Those things are bullshit. Are you sell your fucking data to somebody's.
Schedule that wasn't our fault?
Yeah? Yeah.
Also, I might take their money in the future, but it's bullshit. You know, it's bullshit. Ah, We're back, And I just want to say to our listeners who are silicon based life forms, I actually I don't have any issue with silicon based life you know, I'm a big rock Monster fan. I think you guys should have the same rights that the rest of us have. I'm looking forward to our first rock monster president.
You know.
I assume it'll be like the guy from Galaxy Quest, and I think that would be a lot better for this country. To be honest, man, say they wouldn't prefer a rock monster to the choices we're currently looking at.
Yeah, better, Uh, rock or I was looking for a red or or dead sort of thing. Yeah, I couldn't with rock or rock or you suck.
Yeah.
I don't think he's going to be able to like accomplish a lot proactively, but I do think if we were to let a rock monster loose in Congress, it would be generally good for everyone.
It's the little things, just like that scene and utt things, that's the simple.
Everybody in that movie knocks it out of the park, even Tim Allen, and I hate Tim.
Allen exactly, I thought the same exact thing.
Anyway. I can already hear some people saying, you know, I get that the whole finger every fingerprint is unique thing isn't something that you can conclusively prove, But you just admitted it's probably true. You're just kind of splitting hairs by complaining about experts claiming that they're sure of something, and I don't think I am splitting hairs here. The power of fingerprinting in criminal justice system comes from its presumed unimpeachability. People have been killed repeatedly in large numbers on the certainty that fingerprint analysts know what they're doing, and we have data that shows they often don't. Here's Minucan again quote. Although some FBI proficiency tests show examiners making few or no errors, these tests have been criticized even by other fingerprint examiners as unrealistically easy. Other proficiency tests shown more disturbing results. In one nineteen ninety five tests, thirty four percent of test takers made an erroneous identification. Especially when an examiner evaluates a partial, latent print, a print that may be smudged, distorted, and incomplete, it is impossible, on the basis of our current knowledge to have any real idea of how likely she is to make an honest mistake. And maybe it's much lew, but honestly, if ten percent of the time an average fingerprint examiner is fucking up, that's a sizeable error rates, especially if your life is some line you know and thirty four percent is real fucking bad.
Yeah, that's a big number.
I mean, this is fine if you are making this kind of data aware, if the jury is aware of it, and if you were saying stuff like, you know, we got some imperfect fingerprints and they suggest it might be this person, but our level of confidence is maybe fifty nine percent or whatever, right that, So we think that it's likely, but we can't prove it. You give that information to a jury, I think a reasonably intelligent person can put that in context with other evidence. That's not how it's presented a lot of the time.
You don't have to throw it out. I mean, you should use it, but we need to at least know the limitations of it, at least be yes transparent with the science or lack thereof behind it.
And this is where we get to the problem where there's not a lot of counter experts and while when there are, it's because someone has the money to pay for them. So the people who do not have the ability to like introduce the doubt that ought to be present with a lot of these fingerprint analyzes are like poor people, you know, yeah, right, and that's who gets often. You know, it's not a bunch of rich people going to prison for bad fingerprint analysis. Primarily they can afford the people.
I mean, there are das who are overworked, I'm sure trying to like defend them. How are they going to get that together? I just yeah, it sounds like it would be a massive undertaking.
Yeah, it's I mean, yeah, it's too much to ask for, like the average public defender who is already dealing with way too many fucking cases on zero money.
Yeah.
So, published studies on fingerprinting tend to be case studies where after conviction, an expert will walk the reader through this process that looks to a layman like a scientific study, but it's not. That's analyzing a case in which, like somebody got convicted and walking through your work, as opposed to like actually trying to objectively find good data on how often the matches these people make are right, because there's not really again, there's not really any good way to do that. You often don't find out that someone's been wrongly convicted on the basis of it'll take ten, fifteen, twenty years, right, How like it's getting this kind of information on how flawed this field has took a lot of time, and a lot of people have gotten hurt in the interim. In two thousand and four, Brandon Mayfield was a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, and a pretty prominent one too. He had recently represented the so called Portland Seven, a group of local Muslims who'd been convicted of conspiring to support the Taliban. After nine to eleven that year, he went on vacation to Madrid. And my god, this man picked the worst time to go on vacation to Madrid anyone has ever picked. A group of Islamic extremists carried out a terrorist attack on a commuter train while he was in Madrid that killed nearly two hundred people. Because the FBI be how the FBI do? They flew in to help out the Spanish authorities, and they identified a partial print on a plastic bag that had contained detonators and stick to Brandon, Brandon who was on their shit list because he had defended these guys they had accused of supporting the Dalaban. In the book Junk Science, Innocence Project, lawyer Chris Fabricant writes, to the FBI, Mayfield looked good for it. Spanish fingerprint experts disagreed. But the FBI would not back down. A court appointed expert conducted an additional examination and confirmed the FBI's conclusions. Mayfield remained jailed virtually in communicado for weeks. Only after Spanish police associated the fingerprints with an Algerian national named Daud o'nane did the FBI admit it was wrong, and Mayfield was finally released, after which he successfully sued for two million dollars and elicited something rarer than money from the FBI a public apology.
Oh wow, good on him. Strong, Yeah, strong work.
Yeah, very rare case. It shows you how much they fucked up, right, And also they made the mistake of going after a lawyer. Lawyer, right, yeah, thankfully. I mean, this is obvious. My heart goes out to him for how stressful this must have been. But at least he had the capacity to defend himself.
Yeah.
Now, with hindsight, we can see that the prime reasons the FBI went after Mayfield was that he himself was a convert to Islam who had represented accused terrorists. But at the time, they argued that their experts couldn't be biased. They were using unimpeachable science, even though their experts disagreed with Spanish experts who were presumably using the same science, and they're more experts. They were more experter If you're again framing this to the people making choices accurately, that's no worse than saying like, well, this doctor says someone likely has the syndrome, but this doctor has a different conclusion. Because this is just not something we understand well, right, But that's not how it's being presented. It came out later that the court appointed expert brought in for Mayfield's case, the guy who found a match that matched the FBI's case, had been informed before doing his analysis that the elite FBI fingerprint analysts had found a match before he made his report, Right, So that is something like that's bad science. If someone is conducting is attempting to analyze a fingerprint determined, if it's a match, you shouldn't tell them beforehand that another analyst has made a match because that could prejudice them.
Right, it's not blinded study. It's very unblinded.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, but that happens all the time with this shit, because again, it has this it's dressed as science, but it's not treated that way by a lot of its practitioners, which is again a lot of the people who are criticizing these bad identifications are fingerprint analysts who do treat it as a science. My issue is not that those people don't exist, it's that it is not standardized that that's the expectation for how a fingerprint analyst should operate. You know, this was a public enough fuck up that a cognitive neuroscience tist conducted a rare study into how cognitive bias mightn't form results in forensic studies. He got six fingerprint experts and he gave them eight sets of prints to analyze. Unbeknownst I love this.
Song I love. I was about to say, I love studies like this.
This is this one's real fun because unbeknownst to them, all the sets they were analyzing came from previous cases they had analyzed. So all of these guys had gotten these prints before and made ideas in court cases. Nice they're given the same prints, but not told they're the same prints. Fantastic Thirds of them came to different conclusions while analyzing the same fingerprints a second time.
That's so amazing.
You reminds me of if I made if I made tangent for just one moment. One of my favorite studies I ever saw it was a study of like wine connoisseurs, because you know how there's people who love wine. They've done this some variation of the study a number of times where they took like a bottle of wine and they had it in like a paper bag, and they had another wine in the paper bag. And they said to them, they said, hey, look these are like wine officionados, people who are like you know, some all the aids, et cetera, and.
These wine nerds.
Yeah, they said, this one is like one hundred dollars bottle of wine. This one's like a ten dollars bottle of wine. Rate review them, use different use whatever word you want to describe them, and they would, you know, generally rate them very differently. They would describe them very differently, and they were the same exact bottle of wine. And it was just like still objective, How objective this thing can be.
This happens a lot. It happens with pot, right, There's a lot of pots where people they're like, well, this one will get you this kind of and this one will gets you this kind of high and like, that's kind of true in that different levels of like different cannabinoids can affect the high. But like a lot of what people say about like different strains of pot is bunk. And the same thing happens with cratim where they'll be like, well they've got this kind and this kind and this kind is like well, it's just kind of matters how much of the active ingredient is in it.
But it's also like.
You know, with a wine somalia or with you know, drug nerds or whatever, what's the harm of some guy being like, I know all of the all of the wines that have the best wine text. It's fine, You're not hurting anybody. The worst case scenario is some rich people pay more money for a fancy or wine experience with the fingerprint stuff. It's a real problem. But I do think it's it's kind of worth comparing to that Somalia study because it is it is a kind of like really similar. And again, the point here is not that fingerprint analysis is bunk science or useless. It's that fingerprint analysts are not performing objective science. They are making judgments based on their opinions. They are often being informed ahead of time we think this guy did it, can you tell us if the fingerprint matches, you know, which is not how it should work. It's the same thing with like, you'll hear a lot about how great fucking police dogs are and how they can identify if you've got a little bit of a speck of marijuana and you know, a fucking car or whatever full of stuff. They've got these incredible noses and dog knows are that incredible. Also, that's not how police dogs work. Police dogs are primarily paying attention to when the police officer expects to find drugs and where an alerting off of that. That's how they work. Ask me how I know?
I really want to know.
Really, just because I beat them once, can we talk about this?
I had fuck it, I got I'd gotten pulled over and this is like fucking fifteen years over, pulled over with pot in a car. They brought the dogs out. I had been told by an old head that like, yeah, man, if you get caught, if you get pulled over by the police dogs, look anywhere but at the car. Do not look at the vehicle while they're doing anything, because the cop is watching you to see when you get nervous when the dog gets to a part of your car where the drugs are, and then the cop will either he believed that the cops had a secret signal to the dogs. I think it's actually more likely that you tense up when the dog gets near where the drugs are. The cop sees you tense up, and the dog sees the cop tends up. You know, maybe both of those things are happening. There have been studies on this, though you can actually read into this. They do not work as well as they say they do. It is easy for police dogs to be biased because the dog doesn't know what it's actually doing. Right, The dog is trying to make people happy. That's all the dogs trying to do. I'll smell down, okay, yeah, sure again. Dogs are capable of that kind of sense analysis, but that doesn't mean that's what they're always doing. Just like fingerprints analysts are capable of analyzing fingerprints on the scene and matching them to a person, but that doesn't mean that's what they're doing every time they claim they're doing that, right, Yep, Bias be a thing. Bias and this is the case with every other kind of investigative technique in criminal justice. But forensic science is not treated that way. Part of why is that there's an awful lot of money in ensuring that it is treated as hard scientific truth. The success fingerprint experts have enjoyed in this arena has inspired other would be experts to build their own careers peddling science much more questionable than fingerprint analysis. But you know what's a lot more questionable than even that cave.
Boy, I hope it's some sort of very morally questionable ad.
It is it is, it's an ad for.
I don't know.
I don't actually know what's more morally questionable than our current advertisers. So just buy whatever they're selling. We're back, cave.
Yeah, I'm back too.
Fingerprint analysis is fun. By fun, I mean it's infuriating how often it does not work the way it's supposed to, but it is at least based in real stuff. Now, I'm going to bring us to a true villain, to some absolute, real bullshit forensic science. And of course, the true villain of this episode, Kava, is history's greatest monster.
Tists expect it. Got me again?
Got me again?
Adab baby? Yeah, no, good dentist's right, ight.
So this part of the story starts in September nineteen eighty two, when twenty two year old Teresa Perrin noticed a sailor hitchhiking near her coastal Virginia home. Seeing sailors in uniform was not odd where she lived. There was an aircraft carrier dock nearby, and her husband worked at a nearby naval base. But when she failed to pick this man up, he screamed at her, and later in the days she noticed a similar looking man in a sailor uniform loitering outside her house as she dried her laundry. She went on with her day somewhat agitated until her husband came home. She was finally able to get to sleep. She wakes up in the middle of the night to see a man in a sailor's uniform standing above her. He beats her husband to death with a crowbar while he sleeps, and then he rapes Teresa repeatedly the granular details it I mean, this goes on. I am telling you these start. This is a hideous fucking case. What happens to this woman is just an absolute nightmare. And the whole time she's basically doing everything she can to like make keep him happy because her kids are also in the house and she doesn't want him to kill them too. It's just a fucking nightmare.
One thing I do.
Again, I'm not going to try to go into too much detail, but I do have to note for what comes next that when the man raped her for the second time, he bit her repeatedly on the thighs, hard enough to leave a mark. This is crucial to what comes next. Teresa survives, thankfully, and the case immedia obviously becomes the biggest news in town. Right, this guy gets away, and it's of course people freak out, right there is some unbelievably violent, horrible man on the loose, Like, yeah, a literal monster on the loose. This is one of those cases where everyone panics and it's like, yeah, man, the reason I'd be sleeping with a fucking gun every night, you know, yeah, I would be putting the family in the fucking panic room and have a rifle by my guy.
Outside, like.
I don't already. So Teresa was given a rape kit by a doctor and her injuries were documented in detail. She was so shown mugshots, but no clear culprit materialized. A security guard at the base reported that he had seen a sailor with blood on his uniform enter the shipyard gate at two thirty am. I will note that like that seems like, well, obviously that's the guy. If you've known navymen, a sailor showing up with blood on their uniform at two thirty in the morning to go to bed not uncommon, doesn't mean they've necessarily committed a murder. Sometimes that's just how sailors be. Given the time Teresa said the assault had taken place, this guy could not have been the culprit right two thirty am according to her. And again she's awake with this guy. He's there for hours according to when she said the assault took place, This guy with blood on his uniform couldn't have been the one who did it. It had to have just been a coincidence. But the DA in this case has the security guard hypnotized the security guard who said, yeah, this guy came in at two thirty am, and after being hypnotized, the security guard says no, no, no, he came in at five am. Now that's already very questionable.
I can't think of a softer science than hypnotism.
Yes, that is wow, that is that is the chinchilla fur a forensic science.
It's it's such a it was so nice and sometimes I'm so proud of you.
And then that reference right there was.
One of the beautiful, beautiful moment, beautiful.
So unfortunately, and this is, you know, we'll talk about hypnotism some other day. This is kind of really at a peak point in the early eighties of hypnotism being introduced into court cases. This also plays into the Satanic Panic, which is happening around the same time. But they decided to have Teresa. The DA has Teresa hypnotized as well, and after being hypnotized, she claims that the sailor who attacked her was definitely the same guy as the hitchhiking sailor who had yelled at her earlier. Obviously, a shitload of sailors are in town. The idea that one of them would be a murderer and a rapist and not the same guy who just like yelled at her randomly when she drove past him in town pretty actually good odds that they're not the same guy. But the DA once that's an easier like line of logic. So the DA you know, has her hypnotized, and then she changes her story right to be like, I'm sure it was the same guy. So again, already, just from a fact standpoint, we're not off to a great start with this case, with like trying to track down the culprit based a.
Real, real eighties like movie of the week sort of like.
We used hypnosis.
It's a brand new science out of Europe to like get these people to like open up their minds more. Oh, it's terrible, it's so depressing.
It's rough stuff. It's rough stuff. And based on this very flawed information, it has decided that the man who had attacked her must be a sailor on the nearby USS Carl Vinson. Now again, this is the aircraft carrier that's in town. Pretty good chance that the guy who attacked her was, But also not the only sailors in town. So the district attorney on the case, Willard Robinson, asked the captain of the Carl Vinson to provide the state with dental records for all thirteen hundred of the sailors under his command. That way a dental expert could analyze them. He had already had an expert analyzed Teresa's bites, and the expert had concluded that the assailant had possessed a pointed front tooth that was misaligned. Now, extensive analysis did not come forward with any clear identification. The case languished, and the family started complaining to elected officials in both the DA and Navy felt extreme pressure to resolve the case. Then, in March, a twenty six year old sailor on the Vincent, Keith Allen Harwood, was arrested over a domestic dispute. He was drunk as hell during this fight and is alleged to have bitten his girlfriend. Again, that sounds damning until I note that he bites her after she hits him with a frying pan, which does make it sound less like this guy is a biting psychopathem and more like, well, this was just a real bad relationship.
That's a very toxic relationship. That the frying that's a nice time.
I mean, yeah, again, you wouldn't call this good behavior, but it's hardly like evidence that this man is a murderer. But once he's in custody, you have got a sailor and he bits somebody, you know, not he's a surprising he's a bier. Yeah, yeah, right, so he starts to look pretty good to this increasingly desperate DA who was really getting pressured to solve this fucking case now, Because this guy was on the Carl Benson and they'd provided dental records to the to the state, this guy's teeth had already been looked at, and experts had analyzed his teeth and said he couldn't be the man who had bit Teresa, right, So that's a problem.
Now.
I'm going to read from a write up in the National Registry of Exonerations which should give you an idea of where this case ends up.
Quote.
Harward had been among those whose teeth were examined in the immediate aftermath of the investigation, but he had been ruled out as the source of the bitemarks on Teresa by a civilian dental consultant working with a Newport News City medical examiner. When Harward came to court, Teresa was there but could not identify him as the attacker. At that point, police asked Harward to submit to a second procedure to obtain a cast of his teeth. The cast was sent to Lowell Levine, then a budding superstar in the fledgling field of bitemark analysis, who had gained fame for his testimony linking bite marks to serial killer Ted Bundy and to Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengela. Levine concluded that Harward was responsible for the bitemarks on Teresa's body. Police showed a photographic lineup to Wade, who selected Harward's picture as the man who came through the security gate with a blood spattered uniform. On May sixteenth, nineteen eighty three, police arrested Harward on charges of capital murder, rape, robbery, and burglary. He is ultimately convicted and he is sentenced to life in prison. He appealed that, and the Virginia Supreme Court did grant him a new trial in nineteen eighty six. Levine testified at this that's the bitemark guy testified at this second trial that there was a quote very very very very high degree of probability that Harward's teeth had made the bite marks. Now that's not scientific language. So he followed by assuring jurors there that there was a quote practical impossibility that someone else would have all these characteristics that Levine found in the bite marks. And again, what we have here is a real science. That is providing cover for a pseudo science, because dental analysis is very real, very real thing. You can like, like, that's how we identify dead bodies and stuff by their dental records all the time. You know, dental analysis.
Is a thing.
This guy is good at dental analysis. Bite mark analysis not a thing in the same way. I'm going to say. You can never identify a bite mark and match them to someone's teeth, but it is not the same as identifying someone by their dental records.
Can I give an example of this, Yeah, yeah, please? Wrestling with my three children and somebody bit me. It left the mark, and I was like, all right, I should be able to determine because it was really deep into my flesh. Which one of the little bastards did this? And when I held up all their teeth like to the bite they all looked like they could have gone in it all looked like they could have been the one. Like, there's no way, there's no way to tell, there's a way to tell. I know that's not scientific. I'm just telling you my experience, but I feel like I see where you're going with this.
Your experience does hint at the actual science, which is that you have two problems, key problems when it comes to try to identify a bite mark in this way. If the person who is bit survives, as Teresa does, once you are bit, you start to heal. That process of reacting to the injury, which includes swelling up, which could include getting infected, which can include which and eventually includes like the healing of the injury starts immediately, so by the time your injuries are analyzed, and it's likely you know, cops generally when they come under the scene of a rape and murder, the first thing you're doing is not carefully documenting the bitemarks in such a way that it will be helpful to a forensic dentist. Necessarily, already that bite mark has started to change, right, In fact, it's going to change immediately because generally, like when you bite someone hard enough, they swell up, and that's going to alter the look of that bitemark. Likewise, if you've got a corpse that you know someone got murdered and they were bit decomposition also starts immediately, So you cannot say that the skin, like human skin is not like a dental cast.
Right, No, right, And you're exactly right, Like there is a difference between mean someone analyzing like teeth remains of teeth and being like these belong to this person or et cetera. You know, there's a difference between that and saying, well, this bite is related to this person because of there's all these other factors that tie into that, mechanical factors and all these variables that like, it seems like it would be difficult. Maybe there are scientists who can prove me wrong on that, but I could see this being a much more difficult process and just identifying teeth.
It is.
Again, I'm not saying it's a thing you could never do, but it is not in any way the same kind of thing as identifying someone from their dental records. But because Levion is the guy who got famous identifying people from their dental records, and now he is testifying about bite marks, it sure seems like the same thing to again, the people who are not dentists or science authority.
He's an authority exactly how you do not believe him?
Now Harward's testimony again, because he the Supreme would gets in the second case, after Lemne says like it's impossible for someone else to have all the characteristics I found in these bite marks. Hardward's testimony includes some pretty good counter evidence to exonerate him, including the fact that he had an alibi during the time Teresa had been attacked. He had been at a mandatory drug and alcohol abuse program after being caught aboard with weed. He had an alibi. Also, Teresa specifically recalled the rank on the man's uniform because again, her husband works at the naval base. She knows this kind of stuff, and Harward's rank insignia did not match the signia she recalled seeing on her attacker. None of this mattered. Harward was sentenced again largely on the strength of the bitemark analysis and would spend thirty years in prison. Now, again, just as a spoiler, he's innocent. Let's take a look at this expert, Lowell Levine. At the time of the case, he was the most prominent bitemark analyst in the country. His CV took a full half hour to read in court, and like that was a strategy on behalf of the prosecution in the early nineteen seventies, though before this case begins, he was just another dentist. And it's generally like it's a little bit of a this is debatable, but like some people will argue that dentists struggle with depression and dissatisfaction in their jobs at high levels compared to other health professionals.
High rates a suicide I've been told, yeah, yes, compared to other health professionals.
Yeah, there's there's some evidence of that, although it is actually kind of inconclusive. It is worth noting that between twenty three and twenty twenty one alone, the number of dentists experiencing extreme anxiety tripled. Again, that might have more to do with COVID than anything else. I don't know, it's inconclusive, but I bring this up just because the young doctor Levine seemed kind of unfulfilled in his career cleaning teeth and more interested in the sexy, daring work of a forensic detective. He wrote an article for New York Journal of Medicine titled Dentistry and Emerging Forensic Science. Bite mark analysis had never been used in a court case before, but Levine pitched the idea, as Chris Fabricant notes in the book Junk Signs, to truly gain acceptance by his colleagues as a forensic scientist and recognition as an expert Levine advocated for some sort of certification the dentists had to be had to more than contribute to victim identification. Bite marks could be very valuable to be able to establish the identity of the perpetrator of the bite for legal purposes, Levine argued, But he also acknowledged that there was a sea of knowledge we must accumulate before we are willing to make positive identifications in court involving homicide cases, and he was candid about the lack of an objective scientific basis to the new technique. As a result, bitemarks will never be truly comparable to a fingerprint, since we cannot reproduce the three dimensions of the bitten surface. So that's what he writes in the seventies. And that's all kind of reasonable.
Can I think it's very reasonable to I feel for the guy. I'll tell you why. I'm a gastroentrologist, as you know, and I've been pitching this idea of being a forensic proctologist and solving crimes through the dead innus, like reading rings on tree, the sort of thing, right right, I've been pitching the show to NBC for a while. I haven't gotten any positive feedback yet, but I'm not gonna stop because I think there's something to this, and so I understand where this guy is coming from.
I get it.
Yeah, it's like mind Hunter but for butts. Butt hunter.
But yeah, well there it is nailed it.
Man, ma'am, I know you're very distraught right now because your whole family was murdered. But what can you tell me about what the insight of the man's ass probably looked like?
We're gonna need to look at your husband's buttle.
I'm sorry.
So again in you know, this guy writes, like, ten years or so before the Hardward case, bite marks will never be comparable to a fingerprint. They can't be for very you know, basic reasons. Ten years later, though, Levine is a board certified member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, and he testifies scientific certainty that mister Harward caused the bitemark on Teresa Peron's leg. I think ten years ago he said you couldn't do with bitemarks, and his certainty was so convincing that the two dentists who had ruled that Harward hadn't been the bier changed their testimony based on his Wow. So how he and his colleagues accomplished this was that they forced their way into the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and, as he'd written it, created a board certifying entity to ensure they could back up their claims whenever they would analyze a bitemark with titles that sounded impressive to judges and juries. This all started with a conference at a hotel in Chicago with Levine and seven other dentists who had been working ad hoc as experts for prosecutors at local medical examiner offices. They recognized how much money and respect could be theirs if they locked down a more formal role, and they knew the AAFS was the way to do it. The American Academy of Forensic Sciences was the most influential body in the field, and membership was seen as something of a rubber stamp that whatever forensic science you were pushing is the real shit, so.
Good stuff, that's how you do it.
That's yeah, do it.
Yeah, yeah, this is like a very clever plan. So these odontologists knew that if they get in and if they you know, have suddenly a certification, that's going to make it impossible for any layman defense attorney to question their claims, which is going to make them very valuable for prosecutors. They are looking at what's happened with fingerprint experts and they want the same thing for bite marks. The AAFS obviously includes a lot of real experts, because there are real forensic scientists and people in the AFS are trying their level best who helps all horrible crimes. But it also includes a lot of grifter assholes who want money in respect and don't care how many people get wrongly convicted for that to be possible. So when you know, again, I say all this book because I'm deeply critical of this organization for what comes next. And also I think a lot of the people who are not, you know, odontologists in this organization probably see what Levine and the others are claiming about bite marks and assume they know their's because they're doctors, you know, and because not just because of that, odontologists had always been a big part of forensics, because dental records are that's a real way to identify remains, you know. So these folks feel like Levine and his crew are the real deal, even though bite mark analysis has nothing to do with id in corpses via dental records. And I want to read a quote from Fabricat's book, just sort of laying into how flawed this is. Bitemark analysis involves subjective interpretation of a bruison skin and guessing whether it could have been made by teeth, and if so, whether a particular suspects teeth made the mark. You appreciate that the sub disciplines of forensic odontology have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, that they can be made to sound like they do. Forensic dentists identify people through their teeth and through the bite marks their teeth make. That sounds straightforward, but it's actually more like a geologist claiming that because he can identify rocks, he can identify the rock that was used to bash someone's skull. And geologists out there, there's a lot of money for you if you want to take that one up.
So business idea number thirty three is fantastic.
Yeah, using real forensic dentistry as cover Levine and his cadra of I can't call them grifters legally, but I'm very critical of these people slide into the AAFS. They are accepted despite the fact that very there's not a lot of them, and crucially, there's not any rigorous scientific data laying out the objective best practices for comparing bite marks to teeth. A lot of real experts might point out that there are deep flaws in the the iver. Again, what everything I've said about like tissue, it's kind of the only really good bite marks that you can do a cast of someone's teeth and match to the bitemark is what are called. It's basically like cartilage bites, right, Like, if you get bit in the nose, you can sometimes get a really good bitemark from that because cartilage keeps the mark better. Yeah, it doesn't heal as well skin, right, So this is again these guys are real dentists.
They know this.
They know that if they want to make the case that this is a real science, they need like a famous court case that they solve with bitemark analysis. And because very few bitemarks can actually be analyzed with rigorous science, they're kind of like waiting for a while to find the perfect case to like make a big splash with. You know, this is this is a tough thing. You need a case that's horrific enough that it captures imaginations and gets media attention, and bite marks need to be involved somehow, and most importantly, the suspect needs to be poor, you know, so that experts.
It's so it's such a bummer to take a step back for a second and be like, there's enough bite related crime, Like there's vicious attacks so terrible that people are biting in this animalistic way, victims biting people, Like this is a thing that's developing. That's that's kind of a weird concept for me to understand, Like that's common enough that this is even something that they're trying to look for.
Yeah, yeah, that's it is that.
People the worst they were weird.
In February of nineteen seventy four, Levine and his colleagues got their dream case. A seventy three year woman was beaten, stabbed in the genitals, and murdered. She had been bitten on the tip of her nose, and it created the perfect bitemark for forensic dentistry. Levine had written two years prior about the need for such a three D bitemark, which was rare, to establish the legitimacy of his field. Now they had it. The prosecutor in this case suspected that Walter Marx was the guilty party because he had rented a room from her, but there was no actual evidence that he had committed the crime. So the prosecutor reached out to three dentists and they responded by saying the judge needed a subpoena Marx for a cast of his teeth. Marx refused, and so a judge jailed him for six weeks until he complied. Now, Fabricant notes that the mere process of forcing someone to have a mold taken is biasing, right, that it can bias, like the people analyze that mold because like, well, why would this be taken unless they was a reason to believe this guy was guilty, you know. And no structures were set up within the field of bite mark analysis to ensure that people comparing molds of wounds and teeth were objective right, looking at the information purely as information, rather than acting as paid members of a prosecution team. Jerry Vale, one of the dentists brought in for the case, was over the moon with excitement about the quality of the bite marks in this specific case. He convinced the judge that he was an expert, and Marx was convicted. The prosecutor later told the La Times there is no question, but this case is going to go down as the most significant bitemark case in forensic history. People v. Marx became the foundational case in the field of bitemark analysis, even though it opened by acknowledging no established science of identifying persons from bite marks.
But see that's good.
The problem here, and you're probably going to go into is that, like, this is the fundamental difference between like law and science, is that now this is set as precedent. Now in the legal sense, they are going to be like, Okay, well we've done this one thing and it seems that I mean, if what I've watched on TV is correct, again not a lawyer, if what I've seen is correct, then is like they're going to use that as precedent later in another case, whereas science is the opposite. You don't go based on precedent. You go based on things are constantly changing, it's always evolving. It should be they should be progressing. Sort of problem with COVID for example, you know.
With our knowledge of COVID, if science was based on precedent, like oncologists would be like, well, we really think this chemotherapy thing might help me, Like, well, no, no, no, I'm sorry. We established with precedent that we melt people's cancer with fire, you know, like that's what we've been doing for thirteen hundred years.
Yeah, the president is clear, right, but now it's a precedent and that's all you need in law, like present from one hundred years ago about whatever.
Yeah, yeah, anyway, cobab that's the end of part one. In part two, we have a lot more things that are going to make you angry. But first, why don't you make the audience know where your pluggables are.
Yes, you can find my podcast, The House of Pod. It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We look at the intersections of public health and social justice sometimes and pop culture and it's fun. And if you like Behind the Bastards, you're probably gonna like our show. We're similar, but not as good. So check us out with that's a pretty good sell, right, We're not as good. Check us out anywhere you get podcasts. And if you want to follow me on socials the Cave, look up CAVEMD, or look.
Up The House of Pod.
You know, Cava, I've found this is one of my life hacks that you listeners at home can take. People really like and trust you more when you use self deprecating humor. So I've started whenever I meet new people saying hi, I'm Robert and just so you know, three years ago I was involved in a hit and run that killed seven people.
Yeah, it's a great way to bring you guys.
It makes it, It makes them trust. You're like, oh, you know, this guy is not you know all you know, up on his own about stuff, right, you know, and he makes mistakes just like me. He kills seven people in a hit and run, you know.
And they're like, this is a Wendy sir. What do you I have a Hamberg?
Mm hmm, all right, until I got part one's done, Goodbye, Goodbye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
