Opinions need not be feared nor suppressed.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Dead wrong

This one is a bit disturbing.

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


Watch Frontline's documentary [1] produced in conjunction with this story. And listen to NPR's All Things Considered [2] for more on this story.


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.

Remind me here, who is the current Luzerne County Coroner?

Far be it from me to expect less than services of extreme distinction from my soon-to-be replaced corrupt county government.

Later

1 comment:

D.B. Echo said...

Didja hear the one about the world-famous medical examiner who accidentally washed the last physical evidence in a court case down the sink? And then he said it was irrelevant to the case, anyway?

WVW: fedeat: A diner frequented by the FBI agents investigating county government.