I'm Pro Competency

“There are coroners out there trying to carry out death investigations, but they don’t have the training, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the infrastructure, and they don’t have the skill,” says Marcella Fierro, Virginia’s former chief medical examiner. “I guess you really have to ask yourself, do you want your cause of death and your manner of death to be decided by someone in medicine who has special competency to do that.”

Best known as the model for Patricia Cronwell’s fictional medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, Fierro knows something about storytelling—how someone might change or stretch facts in order to achieve an effect. As she’s questioned by Lowell Bergman in Post Mortem, Fierro underscores the consequences of inept or reckless forensics investigations: deaths may be misunderstood, accusations may be falsely made, and guilty parties may walk free. In the United States, such consequences too often are brought on by coroners who are elected to their offices—without need of medical qualifications.

An investigation conducted by Frontline, Pro Publica, and NPR, Post Mortem—airing this week on PBS and available on line—looks at a few specific cases to demonstrate just how wrong a coroner’s report can be. As the program points out, nearly 7,000 people die each day in the U.S., and causes can range from obvious to obscure. When someone dies “suddenly,” Post Mortem submits, forensic pathologists sort through evidence—bodies and potential crime scenes—in order to determine how it happened. While Fierro suggests, a little romantically, that she “talks with” corpses, the point is that technology and science have advanced significantly in recent decades, so that bodies can reveal events if the individuals attending to them actually pay attention. “A lot of people see TV and CSI and they think that’s how it really is. But really, it varies from excellent to absolutely lousy,” sums up Vincent DiMaio, chief medical examiner in San Antonio.

Post Mortem finds particular problems with the work of Dr. Thomas Gill, formerly of Sonoma County. When one of his reports troubled a victim’s family, they brought in a private investigator, who discovered that Gill had a checkered past and a poor record in performing autopsies. The PI reports: “Dr. Gill was caught on tape lying about his findings, lying about his background, to the point that the government could not go forward, and came into court one morning and dismissed all the charges.”

“Botched autopsies,” Post Mortem asserts, can lead not only to lost cases, but also to wrongful convictions and long prison sentences for innocents. They can result from incompetent practitioners, like Dr. Gill, or from lack of resources, sometimes a function of which side of a border a body is fond. One county may have decent facilities and competent officers, while the next one over may have only a garage and no refrigeration facilities. The program points to a renowned instance, when medical examiner Tim Brown was confronted with an anonymous body, which he examined and then had to cremate, because he had no refrigeration unit or funds for burial. Dental records later showed the body to be that of Michael Jordan’s father: two men were convicted, the program notes, but subsequent media stories complained that Brown should not have cremated the remains—a choice made daily by hundreds of coroners without storage options or even advanced identification equipment.

Post Mortem means to make you worry, but it does so not by sensationalizing its several stories, but rather, by detailing them. The father of Cayne Miceli, who died in custody, found that the medical examiner’s report covered up for police errors. He observes, “There’s no reason for a family to have to go through this and it seems to me that this pathologist and the coroner are enablers, they find what the sheriff or the police department want them to find.”

Another case in the same county, Orleans Parish in Louisiana, involves the same coroner, Frank Minyard. Following up on a case reported in another Frontline, Law & Disorder, Bergman asks Minyard about Henry Glover, whose body was found in a burned-out car after Hurricane Katrina. Minyard’s office said the case was not a homicide, though a federal investigation determined the opposite, and a New Orleans police officer has since been convicted of Glover’s murder. Still, Minyard insists his office functions as a “Palace of Truth,” even as Bergman suggests that palace is influenced by the needs of “law enforcement.” Minyard has no clear answer:” The truth is what we peddle,” he declares, as Post Mortem reveals exactly the opposite. Asked about other questionable cases, Minyard says, “These things have a way of looking bad like you are reporting it, but those people you’re talking about just now, I don’t even know who they are.”

This is hardly a satisfactory response. And Post Mortem offers its own: corners need to have special expertise. As Fierro puts it, “It’s a question of competency.  I’m not anti-coroner, I’m pro competency.”