NPR News partnered with ProPublica and PBS Frontline to investigate the nation’s 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices, and finds a startlingly troubled system.
Here’s what ProPublica says about the excellent cross-platform series:
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.
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 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.
“I thought it was a superficial autopsy,” said Dr. David Balash, a forensic science consultant and former Michigan state trooper hired by the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department to evaluate the case. “You see a lot of these kinds of things, unfortunately.”
More than 1 in 5 physicians working in the country’s busiest morgues — including the chief medical examiner of Washington, D.C. — are not board certified in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death, our investigation found. Experts say such certification ensures that doctors have at least a basic understanding of the science, and it should be required for practitioners employed by coroner and medical examiner offices.
California Watch has the story of Dr. Thomas Gill, a forensic pathologist who reportedly kept practicing in multiple California counties despite botched autopsies and a past of drinking on the job.
Listen, watch and read. It is not comforting, but it’s important.
Photo by Michael McClure
They are not paid enough, hence the shortage. In 2002, Gill took a job in Kansas City for $140k a year. The MINIMUM salary for a MLB player that year was $300k.
When the “pickings are slim”…..you take what you get. If we want these Forensic Pathology Drs. to be anywhere near the top of their field, their needs to be some incentive for them to go into that field.
That being said, it’s obvious Gill is incompetent. I wonder how many incompetent general practioner drs. there would be if they were paid no more than what these guys make. A decent Chiropractor makes more money than these guys.
I’d have to agree ATQ. This has got to be one of the grossest jobs there is, mulling over a corpse that has been sitting in a lake or burned or in a house for 2 weeks or whatever. I’m sure it takes a rare breed of person that decides to get into that type of business and a little $$$ would be a good incentive to bring that rare breed out of the woodwork.
Why would a Dr. choose that line of work to go in to, unless you paid her/him big bucks? I would think it’s the LAST field that a Dr. wants to study.
#1. You aren’t going to save anybody’s life.
#2. It’s all gore, all the time.
#3. There’s going to be attys. tearing apart your work on every murder case you do.
It seems to me like Gill was in this field because he couldn’t do anything else. He was hired in KC because there were only two applicants. I’d like to see the persons resume that lost out to him. lol.
Years ago, I knew a guy that became a millionaire the hard way. He owned over 500 port a potties and would lease them out. He said very few people wanted to go into that business, because NOBODY wanted to do the dumping/cleaning of them.
This cat got rich because there wasn’t much competion.
He used to joke around about it and say:
“I put up with more shit on my job than anyone, but I get paid well for doing it”.
I asked one time if it was worth the money and he said: “Just barely. I wouldn’t do it if me and my family couldn’t live very well because of it”.
So there you go. I would think the same applies with these drs.. If we want competence in that field, we are going to have to pay for it because obviously, drs. aren’t knocking down the doors to go into it.