Understanding the Principals of Forensic Dentistry Identification

Added: 12/08/2005

Primetime television seems to put the best spin on forensic dentistry identification. We've seen similar scenarios at least a dozen times: a body is burned beyond recognition or was retrieved from weeks under the water. The only way to identify the body is by checking the dental records. Hope there's no cavities! This is what forensic dentistry identification deals with. It compares dental remains of the body with the forensic dentistry record in order to establish the identity of the deceased.

Investigators can't ask for a person's identification after they're dead now can they? Most common situations of unidentifiable bodies are violent crimes with total disfiguration of the body due to fires, explosions, and car accidents. Bodies recovered a long time after dying and those found in water often cannot be visually identified. Forensic dentistry identification is of great importance in natural disasters and mass casualties such as aviation disasters and terrorist attacks. Forensic dentistry identification succeeds because a person's enamel teeth tend to survive even the most horrific of accidents

Forensic dentistry identification follows two basic principals: comparative identification and postmortem profiling. Comparative identification is used to establish if the deceased person and the person represented by ante mortem (before death) dental records are the same individual. This method requires some essential conditions. The body and the circumstances of death usually provide some clues or certain information about the identity of the decedent. Police look for any ante mortem dental records of the presumably deceased person. This can be any written notes, study casts, radiographs and other forensic dentistry records.

Obviously, individuals with multiple and complex dental treatments are usually easier to identify than those with no restorative treatment. Specialists effectuate a detailed comparison of the two records and determine the level of coincidence. There are four basic conclusions that can be made: Positive identification, possible identification, insufficient evidence and exclusion.

Sometimes there are no clues about the identity of the decedent. In this case specialists resort to a procedure, called postmortem profiling. It helps in limiting the potential population pool to which the decedent could possibly belong. Postmortem profiling provides information on deceased's age, sex and socio-economic status. In some cases it can even indicate occupation, dietary habits, and dental or systemic diseases. Any of this information can be helpful in identifying a person.

Beside these two basic methods - comparative identification and postmortem profiling - there is a number of more novel and innovative techniques that can be applied. They include identification by labeled dentures and other dental material. One of the most advanced methods is DNA identification. It compares the DNA extracted from the teeth of unidentified person to a known ante mortem sample such as stored blood, hairbrush, and clothing. Beside forensic dentistry identification there are a lot of other possible ways for dentistry to help legal instances. One of them is the investigation of human bite marks.

Teeth are often used as weapons in crucial struggles between assailant and victim, especially frequent in sexual attacks. Human bite marks found on victim's body and investigated by specialists can confirm or exclude the involvement of the suspect in crime. Although there can be other different possibilities of dentistry to include in forensic cases, forensic dentistry identification remains the mostly used forensic dentistry procedure.

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