Criminal Law - Expert Testimony on Bite Marks

The admission of expert testimony identifying an assailant by his bite marks on the victim is an issue on which few courts have ruled. The issue first was addressed by the North Carolina courts in State v. Temple. The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled expert testimony on bite marks was admissible as an instrumentality which aids justice in the ascertainment of the truth. The Court refused to accept the defendant\u27s contention that the experts\u27 testimony should have been excluded because it was based on the results of a test not scientifically proven for reliability. A unanimous Court found the expert testimony was based on established scientific techniques of dentistry and photography applied to solve the novel problem of identifying bite marks on a murder victim. These scientific techniques belong to the field of forensic odontology. Forensic odontology seeks to relate and apply dental facts to legal problems. In a bite mark identification problem, the suspect\u27s dentition, the kind, number and arrangement of teeth, is compared with bite marks found on the victim to determine if the suspect\u27s teeth made the marks