Forensic Pathology News
Dr. Young will post links to news articles that interest him about
forensic pathology, medical examiners, coroners and death
investigation in this section.
Pathology in the News
- After two years, child abuse charges dropped against SC couple
- The legal battle began May 7, 2017, after Joyner discovered her son’s left leg was swollen. Doctors discovered fractures to Foxx’s leg and elsewhere on his body. They suspected child abuse and called the S.C. Department of Social Services. Foxx was placed into foster care where he remained until Joyner and Coker won back custody of their son after a trial to terminate parental rights in January this year. During that trial, an expert testified that the boy’s injuries were consistent with nutritional rickets — a bone-weakening condition brought on by vitamin D deficiency — and not abuse.
- Coroner: Scioto County baby found in well was placed in plastic bags, crates bound by chains
- What did the parents say?
- Parents sue medical examiner to change daughter’s death ruling from suicide to homicide
- Ellen Greenberg's 2011 death was first investigated as a suicide before the medical examiner called it a homicide, then reversed his decision and called it a suicide. Her parents, Joshua (pictured) and Sandra Greenberg are conducting their own investigation and have sued the medical examiner's office.
- Top pay OK'd to get chief medical examiner
- A legislative panel Tuesday endorsed the state Department of Public Safety's request to pay the maximum-authorized salary of $270,455 a year for the state Crime Laboratory's chief medical examiner post to help attract well-qualified candidates. The salary range for the vacant chief medical examiner post is $175,620 to $270,455 a year. The post has been vacant since July, said Tony Robinson, personnel review administrator for the Bureau of Legislative Research.
- Miami’s Frost Museum of Science wants adults to stay overnight, solve murder mysteries in pajamas
- Thanks to the Sherlock Effect, museums of science like to dabble in detective fiction.
- Boy dies after falling from wagon at children's hospital
- BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - An Alabama boy has died after falling out of a wagon that's commonly used at a children's hospital in Birmingham. [What about all of those cases where child abuse pediatricians claim that children don't die from short falls?]
- In the rush to harvest body parts, death investigations have been upended
- Coroner officials said police did not inform them of the possible abuse complaints until 10 days after Jinde died. They said they were able to complete their investigation by using the autopsy exam, hospital records and photos, and determined that she died of natural causes, including severe heart disease. After reviewing the autopsy report, Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist who has consulted on many prominent death investigations, questioned the coroner’s ability to make that determination when the bones and skin had already been removed.
- How organ and tissue donation companies worked their way into the county morgue
- As the sun set over the Nevada desert, coroners from across the country mingled with business executives, sipping icy margaritas and Tanqueray and tonics by a pool. The private party, held on the terrace of Las Vegas’ Golden Nugget hotel on a summer night in 2017, was a gift from Cryolife, a biotech company that sells valves sliced from human hearts to be used as medical devices. The festivities reflected the cozy relationship that has grown in recent years between the nation’s coroners and the industry that trades in tissues from human cadavers.
- ‘The Nature of Life and Death’ Review: The Queen of Forensic Science
- Ms. Wiltshire, also known as the queen of forensic science, also known as the snot lady for her unique retrieval of microscopic evidence from the nasal cavities of the dead, is a petite, fastidious septuagenarian, a lover of cats, Baroque music and sloe gin who is arguably the U.K.’s premier forensic ecologist-botanist-palynologist. (Palynology is the “study of dust,” or microscopic organic particulates.) In other words, she collects and analyzes the pollen granules and fungal spores that are carried out of, or into, crime scenes on killers’ shoes, clothes, shovels and gas pedals, and helps police figure out the how, what and wheres of a crime. “We all leave our marks on the environment,” she writes, “but the environment leaves its marks on us too.”
Pathology Links
- ACCPE means Affirming the Consequent for Complex Past Events. It is The Sherlock Effect.
- Whenever an expert states the past events that occurred on the basis of looking only at the physical evidence without reference to eyewitness statements, he or she is Affirming the Consequent for Complex Past Events. This is not only logically invalid and unsound, it never works in practice, Sherlock Holmes, CSI and Bones notwithstanding. Whenever ACCPE is listed in my comments to a news article, recognize one more tragic example of how this fallacy can destroy lives. ACCPE can also be understood as "backward reasoning,""effect-to-cause reasoning," or "abductive inference."
- American Academy of Forensic Sciences
- ForensicScienceDegree.org
- For further information on forensic science.
- National Association of Medical Examiners