Jurisprudence and legal issues 391suspect in the case. The firearms examiner, using “caliper measurements ,”
testified that both pieces of cheese had “been bitten by the same set of teeth.”
A local dentist who examined “plaster casts and photographs” testified that
“all were made by the same set of teeth.” In the case Niehaus v. State of Indiana,
the court accepted the testimony of a dentist in his first bitemark case based
upon his years of practice and teaching experience in conjunction with his
training in the field, which consisted of attendance at lectures and advanced
reading. The court stated, “The determination of whether or not a witness is
qualified to testify as an expert lies in the sole discretion of the trial court and
may not be set aside unless there is manifest error or abuse of discretion.”^7
Cases that focus on dental identification are much fewer in number in
the reported appellate decisions. While many appeals mention the fact that
dental identification was utilized to establish the identity of a victim, the issue
itself is not part of the appeal argument and is only mentioned in passing. The
following cases are among those that do comment upon dental identification.
In Boyle v. Brigano a dentist who was also the coroner testified that the den-
tal records and the teeth he examined in the body “matched ... perfectly.”
The court concluded that the evidence presented was sufficient to support
the identification, based in part on the thorough cross-examination of the
dentist by defense counsel.^8 A federal case in Pennsylvania, in which a dentist
identified a defendant by verifying that a missing tooth reported by a witness
was in fact missing, was appealed as a violation of the defendant’s Fourth
and Fifth Amendment rights.^9 Citing two previous Supreme Court cases the
court struck down the Fifth Amendment claim because the dental exami-
nation was neither testimonial nor communicative in nature. The Fourth
Amendment claim was denied due to the lack of any reasonable expectation
of privacy by a defendant over what a person knowingly exhibits (in this case
his smile) to the public coupled with the fact that a dental examination does
not constitute a “search” (quotation marks in original).
In the Alabama case Chafin v. State a dentist identified a skull with-
out the use of mathematics/percentages, but rather by comparison and
based on the outline of a single filling, the bone pattern, and the outline of
another tooth. The court was satisfied that even without specific forensic
training, the dentist was qualified to make the identification and that any
objections by the defense should go to the weight given the testimony by
the jury rather than to its admissibility.^10 In a 1968 Illinois case a defen-
dant raised questions about the ability of the prosecution to trace the
path and possession of a body discovered in a burning car to the autopsy
table; the court was satisfied by the testimony of the funeral director who
transported the body as well as testimony from other witnesses to the fire
that the body examined was in fact that from the crime scene. Although
there was minor variation in two antemortem dental charts used in the
process, the court accepted the expert dentist’s opinion without the use