FEATURED POST

Unveiling Singapore’s Death Penalty Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Public Opinion and Deterrent Claims

Image
While Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) maintains a firm stance on the effectiveness of the death penalty in managing drug trafficking in Singapore, the article presents evidence suggesting that the methodologies and interpretations of these studies might not be as substantial as portrayed.

Mississippi Death Row Case Faults Bite-Mark Forensics

In one of the country’s first nationally televised criminal trials, of the smirking serial murderer Ted Bundy in Florida in 1979, jurors and viewers alike were transfixed as dental experts showed how Mr. Bundy’s crooked teeth resembled a bite on a 20-year-old victim.

Mr. Bundy was found guilty and the obscure field of “forensic dentistry” won a place in the public imagination.

Since then, expert testimony matching body wounds with the dentition of the accused has played a role in hundreds of murder and rape cases, sometimes helping to put defendants on death row.

But over this same period, mounting evidence has shown that matching body wounds to a suspect’s dentition is prone to bias and unreliable.

A disputed bite-mark identification is at the center of an appeal that was filed Monday with the Mississippi Supreme Court. Eddie Lee Howard Jr., 61, has been on death row for two decades for the murder and rape of an 84-year-old woman, convicted largely because of what many experts call a far-fetched match of his teeth to purported bite wounds, discerned only after the woman’s body had been buried and exhumed.

The identification was made by Dr. Michael West, a Mississippi dentist who was sought out by prosecutors across the country in the 1980s and 1990s but whose freewheeling methods “put a huge black eye on bite-mark evidence,” in the words of Dr. Richard Souviron, a Florida-based dental expert who helped identify Mr. Bundy in 1979, in an interview last week.

Since 2000, at least 17 people convicted of murder or rape based on “expert” bite matches have been exonerated and freed, usually because DNA tests showed they had been wrongfully accused, according to research by the Innocence Project in New York. Dr. West was the expert witness in two of those cases.


Source: The New York Times, Erick Heckholm, Sept. 15, 2014

Most Viewed (Last 7 Days)

California | San Quentin begins prison reform - but not for those on death row

Oklahoma | Death row inmate Michael DeWayne Smith denied stay of execution

Indonesia | Bali Prosecutors Seeking Death on Appeal

Ohio dad could still face death penalty in massacre of 3 sons after judge tosses confession

Iran | Couple hanged in the Central Prison of Tabriz

Singapore | Court of Appeal rejects 36 death row inmates’ PACC Act constitutional challenge

Tennessee | Nashville DA asks judge to vacate baby murder conviction following new medical evidence