English: The real crime scene investigators: death detective dysfunction

 English:  The real crime scene investigators: death detective dysfunction

A morphology technician at The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator stores one of the bodies that is autopsied there. The office was created by the state legislature in 1972 replacing the county coroner system.

In detective novels and T.V. crime dramas the nation's morgues are staffed by highly trained medical professionals equipped with the most sophisticated tools of 21st-century science. Operating at the nexus of medicine and criminal justice, these death detectives thoroughly investigate each and every suspicious fatality.  The reality, though, is quite different. 

Blunders by doctors in America's morgues have put innocent people in prison cells, allowed the guilty to go free, and left some cases so muddled that prosecutors could do nothing. Examples: in Mississippi, a physician's errors in two autopsies helped convict a pair of innocent men, sending them to prison for more than 20 years.  And in the Massachusetts medical examiner's office has cremated a corpse before police could determine if the person had been murdered; misplaced bones; and lost track of at least 14 bodies. then in Washington, the medical exaniners office completed an autopsy, where the victim was shot multiple times, yet the report does not indicate, allowing a murderer to go free and an innocent convicted, that conviction was reversed 28 years later after the errors was made public.

In 2020 Detroit on the autopsied the body pulled from a lake the report failed to miss the bullet hole in his neck and the bullet lodged in his jaw.

"I thought it was a superficial autopsy," said David Balash, a forensic science consultant and former Michigan state trooper hired by the Macomb County Sheriff's Department to evaluate the case. "You see a lot of these kinds of things, unfortunately."

More than 1 in 5 physicians working in the country's busiest morgues -- it has been reported --are not board certified in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on death. Experts say such certification ensures that doctors have at least a basic understanding of the science, and it should be required for practitioners employed by coroner and medical examiner offices.

Yet, because of an extreme shortage of forensic pathologists - the country has fewer than half the specialists it needs, a 2020 report by the National Academy of Sciences. Uncertified doctors who have failed the exam are employed by county offices in several States, officials have acknowledged. 

In many places, the person tasked with making the official ruling on how people die isn't a doctor at all. In almost every US State, elected or appointed coroners who may have no qualifications beyond a high-school degree have the final say on whether fatalities are homicides, suicides, accidents or the result of natural or undetermined causes.

Long before the current economic crisis began shrinking state and county government budgets, many coroner and medical examiner offices suffered from underfunding and neglect. Because of financial constraints, States have  slashed the number of autopsies it performs by almost 50% since 2012. Most states are declining to autopsy apparent suicides and most people age 40 and over who die without an obvious cause. And, while many coroners and medical examiners don't even have X-ray machines. 

Dr. Marcella Fierro, the former chief medical examiner in Virginia, is a member of the National Academies of Science panel that issued a report recommending an overhaul the country's death investigation systems. Still, the National Academy of Sciences' study found far-reaching and acute problems. Across the country, the academy said, coroners and medical examiner offices are struggling with inadequate resources, poor scientific training and substandard facilities and technology.

Their limitations can have devastating consequences.

"You call a death an accident or miss a homicide altogether, a murderer goes free," said Dr. Marcella Fierro, Virginia's former chief medical examiner. "Lots of very bad things happen if a death investigation isn't carried out competently and with competence."

as always, stay safe!

bird