Senator’s testimony sent innocent man to prison

Erin Neff

Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003 | 8:50 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Flawed forensic dentistry testimony by state Sen. Ray Rawson, R-Las Vegas, sent an innocent man to Arizona's death row, according to a magazine article published nationally last week.

Rawson, a dentist for 30 years, is the main reason the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has a dental school. He teaches there and at the Community College of Southern Nevada.

Rawson also is an expert in forensic dentistry and has testified about bite marks in several prominent cases.

Rawson said he had no doubt when testifying in 1992 and 1996 Arizona trials that a defendant's teeth matched bite marks on the murder victim.

He said the only reason the case that was tried in 1992 and again in 1996 stands out for him is because the defendant, Ray Krone, was recently freed and has a high profile. Krone has been interviewed by numerous media outlets and testified before Congress about innocent people being on death row -- and about the unreliability of court testimony like Rawson's.

Krone's decadelong battle to get off Arizona's death row and out of prison was featured in a Feb. 23 story in Parade magazine. He had been sentenced first to death, and then to life in prison for a crime he did not commit.

The article notes that in 1992: "The jury convicted Krone on the testimony of a forensic dentist named Ray Rawson, who testified that Krone's teeth matched the bite marks on the victim's breast."

Krone was retried in 1996 and was convicted a second time after "the forensic dentist again testified that it was Krone's bite mark on the dead woman. But the defense produced its own forensic dentists who said the bite mark was not a match. This time Krone was sentenced to life in prison."

"There were three experts on the other side," Rawson recalled. "The jury just agreed with me."

Rawson said the bite marks "were a very good comparison," and he does not feel as though he erred in judgment.

"There were a lot of marks. There were deep marks," Rawson said.

But DNA evidence later proved Rawson wrong. DNA evidence technology had not been advanced enough for use at the time of the trials, the story states.

The story also notes that 63 percent of bite-mark analyses generate false positives.

Rawson disputed that number, saying he was "not aware of that many."

Rawson, 62, conceived the plan for the UNLV Dental School in the late 1990s, shepherded the proposed school through the Legislature and helped secure start-up funding.

He is an adjunct professor at the UNLV Dental School, teaching head and neck anatomy pro bono.

He is also an instructor at the community college, teaching oral radiology and pathology, local anesthesia, dental hygiene and head and neck anatomy.

With college degrees in both dentistry and physical anthropology, Rawson has been tapped to appear in trials nationwide. He missed several days in the 2001 session due to such a case.