Frontline, NPR and ProPublica have collaborated on this revealing investigation into the state of forensic science in the US. The image portrayed by CSI is far from what actually stands for most post mortem forensic analysis in this country.
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.
Watch this report and also visit this tool to determine the standards applied where you live.
