The Foren­sic Sci­ence Geek of the Week

This week’s “www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com Foren­sic Sci­ence Geek of the Week” hon­ors goes to:

THERE ARE ACTUALLY TWO AS TOGETHER THEY GIVE THE PERFECT ANSWER

KELLY CASE, ESQUIRE and MICHAEL DYE, ESQUIRE

KELLY CASE, ESQUIRE, www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com co-Forensic Sci­ence Geek of the Week!
Con­grat­u­la­tions to our win­ner!  All hail the www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com co-Forensic Sci­ence Geek of the Week!!!

About our co-winner:

Crim­i­nal defense lawyer Kelly W. Case grad­u­ated from Tulane Uni­ver­sity School of Law in 1991. He began his legal career as a pros­e­cu­tor with the Galve­ston County Crim­i­nal Dis­trict Attorney’s Office in Novem­ber 1991. In 1995, he left that office to ded­i­cate his prac­tice to defend­ing peo­ple accused of crimes.

Kelly W. Case is Board Cer­ti­fied in Crim­i­nal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Spe­cial­iza­tion. He is a fre­quent lec­turer at National, State and Local defense attor­ney sem­i­nars. He is a cer­ti­fied prac­ti­tioner in the coör­di­na­tion exer­cises used by the police to deter­mine intox­i­ca­tion, called the “Stan­dard­ized Field Sobri­ety Tests” or “SFST’s”. He has writ­ten arti­cles on defend­ing DWI cases where a suspect’s blood has been drawn and fre­quently teaches sem­i­nars on this sub­ject as well as attend­ing more than twice the amount of required Con­tin­u­ing Legal Edu­ca­tion classes.

He is an active mem­ber of sev­eral orga­ni­za­tions includ­ing the National Col­lege for DUI Defense, National Asso­ci­a­tion of Crim­i­nal Defense Lawyers, Texas Crim­i­nal Defense Lawyer’s Asso­ci­a­tion, Texas Trial Lawyers Asso­ci­a­tion, The Col­lege of the State Bar of Texas, Har­ris County Crim­i­nal Lawyer’s Asso­ci­a­tion, Mont­gomery County Crim­i­nal Lawyer’s Asso­ci­a­tion and the Galve­ston County Crim­i­nal Lawyers Asso­ci­a­tion.  He is licensed to prac­tice in the United States Supreme Court, 5th Cir­cuit Court of Appeals, Fed­eral Dis­trict Court for the East­ern and South­ern Dis­tricts of Texas as well as all Texas state courts of law.  He is death penalty cer­ti­fied and a mem­ber of the qual­i­fied list of attor­neys des­ig­nated to accept rep­re­sen­ta­tion for those accused of Cap­i­tal Mur­der where the death penalty is sought in the Sec­ond Admin­is­tra­tive Region of Texas. He is one of 100 lawyers in the Hous­ton metro­plex area selected to the Crim­i­nal Jus­tice Act Panel assigned to pro­vide indi­gent defense to those per­sons accused of fed­eral crim­i­nal violations.

KELLY CASE is Week 10’s www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com co– Foren­sic Sci­ence Geek of the Week!

Michael Dye, Esquire

MICHAEL DYE, ESQUIRE, www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com co-Forensic Sci­ence Geek of the Week!
Con­grat­u­la­tions to our win­ner!  All hail the www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com co-Forensic Sci­ence Geek of the Week!!!

About our co-winner:

Michael Dye, Esquire com­pleted his under­grad­u­ate stud­ies at Gardner-Webb Uni­ver­sity in Boil­ing Springs, North Car­olina.  In August of 1998, Mr. Dye received his B.S. in Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion.  While attend­ing Gardner-Webb Uni­ver­sity, Mr. Dye was a mem­ber of the wrestling and cross-country teams.

Mr. Dye’s legal stud­ies began in 2000 at Nova South­east­ern Uni­ver­sity where he was a mem­ber of the ILSA Law Jour­nal.  Dur­ing law school, Mr. Dye held sev­eral crim­i­nal law related jobs includ­ing a non-attorney posi­tion work­ing with the Miami-Dade County Pub­lic Defender’s Office research­ing juve­niles trans­ferred to the adult court sys­tem.  Addi­tion­ally, Mr. Dye was a law clerk for a promi­nent South Florida crim­i­nal defense attor­ney.  Mr. Dye grad­u­ated from law school in May, 2003.

Upon grad­u­a­tion from law school, Mr. Dye was employed with a lead­ing plaintiff’s secu­ri­ties lit­i­ga­tion law firm.  Mr. Dye decided to pur­sue his pas­sion in crim­i­nal law and opened his own firm, Michael A. Dye, P.A., in Decem­ber of 2004.  He is now part­ners with Jane Weath­erly, Esquire.

In addi­tion to being licensed in three juris­dic­tions, Mr. Dye is a mem­ber of sev­eral pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions.  Mr. Dye is a mem­ber of the National Col­lege of DUI Defense, the North Car­olina Bar Asso­ci­a­tion, and the Crim­i­nal Law Sec­tion of the Florida Bar.

In April of 2006, Mr. Dye was admit­ted to the North Car­olina State Bar.  Mr. Dye actively prac­tices law and main­tains an office in both North Car­olina and Florida.  Although Mr. Dye prac­tices in all areas of crim­i­nal defense, han­dling cases rang­ing from traf­fic offenses to cap­i­tal mur­der, his pri­mary area of prac­tice relates to seri­ous drug offenses and DUI’s.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to our win­ners! All hail the www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com Foren­sic Sci­ence Geeks of the Week!!!

See the chal­lenge ques­tion that our win­ners cor­rectly answered.

Our win­ners com­bined to answer the ques­tion cor­rectly.  Please visit the www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com Face­Book fan page.
Our Geeks of the Week answered:

Keely Case, Esquire answered:

Top pic­ture is bite match­ing involv­ing den­tist or oral sur­geon, that has made an impres­sion from the bite mark.
Bot­tom pic­ture is tem­plate of human bite and tooth anatomy.
This “sci­ence” has huge lim­i­ta­tions, mainly with­out know­ing the actual bite pat­tern and only using human body bruis­ing as the tem­plate, it is almost impos­si­ble to develop an accu­rate mold of the tooth struc­ture. It’s like using jello to make a mold. If a sus­pect teeth and jaw mold is taken and appears to match, it is very dif­fi­cult to know whether that is an actual match or an approx­i­ma­tion. Junk sci­ence at its finest.

Michael Dye, Esquire answered:

I got this…..The field of sci­ence is called “foren­sic ondon­tol­ogy.” It is sim­i­lar to fin­ger print analy­sis in the sense that it assumes that the ridges and indi­en­ta­tions along the bit­ing edges of an indi­vid­u­als teeth are all dif­fer­ent. Which is the first assump­tion that is wrong. The pic­ture above is a cast­ing of the “sus­pects” teeth which are then com­pard to the bitemark on the vic­tim. There are sev­eral prob­lems with this “sci­ence.” One is the heal­ing process. When an injury like that occurs, there is, for lack of a bet­ter dis­crip­tion, col­lat­eral dam­age to the soft tis­sue sur­round­ing the bite mark. Brus­ing, cut­ting from move­ment dur­ing the attack and the heal­ing process skew the results. The cast­ing is usu­ally not com­pared against the actual injury, but is super­im­posed after being scanned into a com­puter, which is sim­i­lar to pho­to­shop, which is a huge prob­lem for me because I can pho­to­shop the hell out of things.

Additionally,the bitemark pat­tern usu­ally comes from a photo to cre­ate the image which can cause issues with the clar­ity of the photo, the res­o­lu­tion, angles, light­ing etc. The length of time between the attack and the photo will dras­ti­cally alter the bite mark pat­tern althought the govt now claims to be able to do some sort of ret­ro­grade extrap­o­la­tion on the bite mark to insure that the over­lay is exactly the same as the bitemark when it occurred. In most cases time peri­ods are approx­i­mate, so ***cough*** ***cough*** bull­shit. Then there is the whole prob­lem we are hav­ing down here in NC with the SBI. Since it is basi­cally pho­to­shop soft­ware, the tech can make it fit.

So issues: 1) Time of injury; 2) move­mant dur­ing injury; 3) heal­ing process; 4) assump­tion that every­body heals the same; 5) false assump­tion of all teath bite pat­terns being unique, 6) photo qualiy prob­lems 7) pho­to­shoped evi­dence, ret­ro­grade extrap­o­la­tion of the heal­ing process.

For­give my typo’s.

The Hall of Fame for the www.TheTruthAboutForensicScience.com Foren­sic Sci­ence Geek of the Week:
Week 1:  Chuck Ram­say, Esquire

Week 2:  Rick McIn­doe, PhD

Week 3:  Chris­tine Funk, Esquire

Week 4:  Stephen Daniels

Week 5:  Stephen Daniels

Week 6:  Richard Mid­dle­brook, Esquire

Week 7:  Chris­tine Funk, Esquire

Week 8:  Ron Moore, B.S., J.D.

Week 9:  Unclaimed, check it out and claim the honor

Week 10:  Kelly Case, Esquire and Michael Dye, Esquire

Next week’s chal­lenge will be posted on Sun­day morn­ing at 10 am EST.  I AM LOOKING FOR SUGGESTIONS please email me at justin@TheMcShaneFirm.com