Youngsters will be starting schools and nurseries this week across Scotland.
And I’m told one thing teachers regularly have to deal with among new starts is young children who have a tendency to bite. It’s seen as a bad habit in small children that parents and teachers need to stamp out.
But when adults bite it’s seen as a horrendous breach of our social norms – look at the global outcry over Luis Suarez’s antics when he tried to take a chunk out of Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini at the 2014 World Cup.
For those dealing with violent criminals, biting is something that comes up regularly.
A number of offenders – especially during rape, murder and child abuse – bite their victims and human bite marks are also a means by which the perpetrator can demean his victim. They are a sign of sadism and also that the perpetrator wants to have complete control over their victim.
Can these bite marks be used to identify a perpetrator in much the same way as fingerprints and DNA?
The American serial killer Ted Bundy, who killed at least 30 young women in the mid-1970s, was brought to justice because of a bite mark that he left on the corpse of Lisa Levy. The court asked Dr Richard Souvrin to examine Bundy’s teeth and the bite mark left on Lisa’s body and he concluded that the mark had indeed been made by Bundy.
The first British case involving a conviction based on bite marks was the Gorringe case in 1948 when the legendary Home Office pathologist Keith Simpson used bite marks left on the breast of Phyllis Gorringe to secure a murder conviction against her husband Robert.
Since then forensic odontology – that’s dentistry to you and me – is now a respected degree course. However, there have recently been criticisms of the scientific foundation for this type of bite comparison evidence with one study in the US reporting a 63 per cent rate of false identifications.
In 2016 the Texas Forensic Science Commission recommended that bite mark evidence not be used in criminal trials and that bite mark analysis was subjective and not scientific.
The case that is usually cited here is that of Ray Krone – an Arizona man, dubbed the “Snaggletooth Killer” – who was convicted on the basis of a bite mark left on a victim’s breast in 1991 – although DNA evidence later implicated a repeat sex offender Kenneth Phillips and Krone was released from prison in 2002.
So, bite mark analysis has to be cautious. Like fingerprint analysis, forensic odontologists have to be careful about the basis on which their comparisons are made and have others in the field scrutinise their opinion and be prepared to publicly disagree.
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