Let’s imagine that an intruder entered your home one night and fatally poisoned you. Let’s say that during the previous weeks or months you had evinced signs of emotional volatility. Perhaps you were even depressed. Let’s go further and presume that you lived in one of the many places in America experiencing state and municipal budget crises. The police suspect suicide, but because the coroner’s office is underfinanced and understaffed — maybe there isn’t even a place to refrigerate your body until someone can get around to dissecting your corpse — no autopsy is performed to confirm or invalidate those suspicions. A murderer is free and on to the next house and victim.
“Post Mortem,” a documentary on PBS on Tuesday, compellingly demonstrates just how often a situation like this one actually occurs.
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If its own DNA had any less gravitas, “Post Mortem” might have been called “CSI: Miami — What a Big Bunch of Hooey.” Apparently autopsies are performed with far more precision and rigor on fictionalized television than they are in the real world, where some medical examiners aren’t even doctors. The film introduces us to the bizarre obfuscations of Frank Minyard, who has served for more than 30 years as coroner in New Orleans, where he has been elected to the position 10 times. Before becoming the medical examiner he had been an obstetrician, and during his tenure he has overseen a team whose work has repeatedly come under question for gross inaccuracy.
Coroners elsewhere have been blind or drunk, limited to a single refrigerator held together by a belt, or forced to perform their duties without X-ray machines. As Vincent Di Maio, the forensic pathologist and the inspiration for Patricia Cornwell’s character Kay Scarpetta puts it, the work done by forensic pathologists in this country “varies from excellent to absolutely lousy.”
[NYT]
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