While the 2015 lawsuit upheld the protection of the doctors due to ‘qualified immunity’, by this point the study had already begun to be discredited. One judge on the validity of Johnson and Rawson's ‘immunity’ stated ‘the very quackery of the field protects its practitioners from liability… akin to saying that an astrologer has falsified his conclusions’. Johnson and Rawson, at the time of the 1985 case had been leading exponents of bite mark analysis, both were members of the American Bureau of Forensic Odontology, and Rawson himself had provided testimony in many cases including the 1992 trial against Ray Krone who was sentenced as guilty and put on death row; partly due to forensic testimony. Ray Krone would later be exonerated by DNA evidence after serving 10 years in prison.
