Roy Brown Case: Bite Mark Junk Science and DNA Exoneration

The Roy Brown wrongful conviction case is one of the most cited failures of bite mark evidence in American criminal justice. Brown spent 15 years in a New York prison for the 1991 murder of Sabina Kulakowski, convicted on forensic dental testimony that the prosecution’s own leading expert had privately rejected before trial. Working from his cell, Brown identified the real killer, pushed for the DNA testing that cleared him, and walked out on January 23, 2007, exactly 15 years to the day after his conviction.¹

The Murder and Why Brown Became a Suspect

On May 23, 1991, firefighters responding to a farmhouse fire in Cayuga County, New York, found the body of Sabina Kulakowski, a social worker. She had not died in the fire. The coroner determined she had been stabbed, strangled, and dragged roughly 300 yards from the burning farmhouse in her nightshirt. Her body was covered in bite marks. Kulakowski had lived in the farmhouse with Ronald Bench, her partner of 17 years, until they separated two months before her death. The farmhouse belonged to the Bench family.²

Investigators looked past the people closest to Kulakowski and settled on Roy Brown, a magazine subscription salesman from Syracuse. His link to the victim was thin. Brown had recently served eight months in jail for making threatening phone calls to the director of the Cayuga County Department of Social Services, the agency that placed his daughter in residential care. Kulakowski worked for that agency. That was enough to make him the primary suspect. A court order compelled Brown to provide dental impressions, and he was arrested shortly afterward and charged with second-degree murder.²

The Bite Mark Testimony at Trial

Brown’s trial began in January 1992 in Cayuga County Supreme Court. The prosecution’s case rested on the bite marks. Dr. Edward Mofson testified that seven marks on Kulakowski’s body were “entirely consistent” with Brown’s teeth. There was a visible problem with that conclusion. One of the marks showed six upper teeth in a continuous line. Brown had only four upper teeth. Mofson accounted for the gap by suggesting Brown could have twisted the victim’s skin while biting, filling in for the teeth he did not have.²

On January 23, 1992, after less than six hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Brown. Before sentencing, he told the courtroom, “I never knew Ms. Kulakowski, and I had nothing to do with that woman’s death. I am truly innocent.” He received 25 years to life.²

The Expert Opinion the Jury Never Heard

Before trial, District Attorney Paul Carbonaro had retained Dr. Lowell Levine, widely regarded as New York’s leading forensic dentist, to examine the bite mark evidence. Levine told Carbonaro directly that “Roy Brown was not the biter.” Rather than turn that opinion over to the defense, Carbonaro ordered Levine to return the evidence at once and never write a report. The jury heard Mofson. It never heard Levine.¹

Brown’s Investigation From Prison

Brown refused to accept the verdict. From prison, he wrote to legal organizations, including the Innocence Project, and filed request after request under New York’s Freedom of Information Law for documents from his case file. For more than a decade he worked through those records looking for what investigators had missed.

He kept returning to one name: Barry Bench, the brother of Kulakowski’s former partner Ronald Bench. The farmhouse where Kulakowski was killed belonged to the Bench family, and the separation had happened only weeks before the murder. Brown petitioned prosecutors and courts to test biological evidence from the crime scene, convinced the results would clear him and point to Bench.²

The DNA Match

Authorities eventually agreed to test saliva found on the victim’s nightshirt near the bite marks. The profile excluded Brown. It matched Barry Bench, the man Brown had identified from his cell.

Investigators never got to question him. In 2003, five days after Brown mailed Bench a letter accusing him of the crime, Bench jumped to his death in front of an Amtrak train. His body was later exhumed to confirm the DNA match, and the result held.²

On March 2, 2007, Dr. Lowell Levine finally put in writing what he had told the district attorney 15 years earlier. In a formal supplemental report he stated: “Roy Brown is not the source of any of the bite marks.”¹

Release, Exoneration, and Compensation

In December 2006, the Innocence Project filed a motion to vacate Brown’s conviction. The motion was granted, and Brown walked out of prison on January 23, 2007. On March 5, 2007, Cayuga County District Attorney James Vargason, the same prosecutor who had tried Brown in 1992, announced the state would not retry the case. The charges were dismissed and Brown was fully exonerated. He was the 196th person in the United States exonerated through DNA evidence.¹

He left with nothing. As he later told the Innocence Project, “When you get out of prison, they give you $40 and a pair of corduroy pants, but that’s only for the guilty people. I didn’t even have anything to wear.”

In December 2008, New York State paid Brown $2.6 million through the state’s Court of Claims for his 15 years of wrongful imprisonment. New York’s Unjust Conviction and Imprisonment Act allows people convicted of crimes they did not commit to seek compensation if their conviction was reversed and charges dismissed, provided they can show by clear and convincing evidence that they did not commit the crime and did not cause their own conviction.³ The award worked out to roughly $173,000 for each year he spent in prison. Brown also needed a liver transplant after his release, and the Innocence Project helped him secure insurance coverage for the procedure.

Why the Forensic Evidence Against Him Was Junk Science

The technique that put Brown in prison has since been rejected by the scientific bodies that studied it. Bite mark analysis rests on three assumptions: that every person’s dental pattern is unique, that skin reliably records those patterns during a bite, and that analysts can accurately interpret what they see. None have held up.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward,” which found that the uniqueness of human dentition had never been scientifically established, that skin had not been shown to reliably preserve bite patterns, and that no standard existed for the type or quality of characteristics needed to make a meaningful comparison. The committee reported “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” In 2016, the Texas Forensic Science Commission concluded that bite mark testimony “does not meet the standards of forensic science” and called for its elimination from criminal trials. That same year, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found that the method “does not meet the scientific standards for foundational validity.”⁴

A 2023 review by the National Institute of Standards and Technology reached the same conclusion, finding that none of the three foundational premises of bite mark analysis are supported by the available data.⁵ Bite mark evidence, however, remains admissible in courts across the country. At least 26 people have been wrongfully convicted based on it.⁴

Brown’s case brought two failures together. Prosecutors buried a favorable expert opinion and replaced it with a witness willing to testify the opposite, using a technique that has since been discredited by the scientific community. The combination cost him 15 years. It also produced something unusual in the exoneration record: a wrongfully convicted man who, from a prison cell with nothing but case documents and persistence, solved the crime himself.

1
Innocence Project. Proven Innocent by DNA, Roy Brown Is Fully Exonerated
2
Innocence Project. Roy Brown
3
NYCOURTS.GOV. New York State Consolidated Laws: Court of Claims Act
4
Innocence Project. Why Bite Mark Evidence Should Never Be Used in Criminal Trials
5
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Bitemark Analysis: A NIST Scientific Foundation Review