The Real “CSI”: How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk

[The Straight Story]

The Real “CSI”: How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk

In detective novels and television crime dramas like "CSI," 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 far different. In a joint reporting effort, ProPublica, PBS "Frontline" and NPR spent a year looking at the nation's 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices and found a deeply dysfunctional system that quite literally buries its mistakes.

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.

In Mississippi, a physician’s errors in two autopsies <4> helped convict a pair of innocent men, sending them to prison for more than a decade.

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 five bodies.

Late last year, a doctor in a suburb of Detroit autopsied the body of a bank executive pulled from a lake -- and managed to miss the bullet hole in his neck and the bullet lodged in his jaw.

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-real-csi-americas-patchwork-system-of-death-investigation

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Ok I feel better

the coroner office south of the border then is average.

True story, speaking of training and evidence preservation. We went to pick a waiter who was shot in the upper leg. So me, dutiful medic takes trauma shears and cuts pants, PRESERVING the whole entry. Yes, it be easier to just use the hole. BUT NO! And then asked the cop for a PAPER bag... I have never seen a more befuddled OLDER officer. His young partner actually paid attention at the Academy, wehre his older FTO had never been... so he was oh so happy to get that.

One of those stories that makes me smile.

[NBachers]

2. Wasn't there a victim named Lori Klausutis who's death was bungled by an inept coroner?

Now, who was that Florida congressman who's office was the site of this suspicious death?