Forensic bitemark identification: weak foundations, exaggerated claims.

Several forensic sciences, especially of the pattern-matching kind, are increasingly seen to lack the scientific foundation needed to justify continuing admission as trial evidence. Indeed, several have been abolished in the recent past. A likely next candidate for elimination is bitemark identification.

Ten years after Daubert: the status of the states.

This paper examines how many of the states have changed their respective scientific-evidence admissibility standards under the influence of the United States Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert decision. The authors offer a definition of what constitutes a Daubert state, and using this definition classify the fifty states into three categories. These are: Frye states (15 states, 10 with codified evidence rules patterned after the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE)); Daubert states (26 states, 24 with FRE-based rules), and non-Frye/non-Daubert states (9 states, 7 with FRE-based rules).