Medical Examiner's Office

I was unable to attend the last field trip of the semester due to minor car troubles, but through some research I’ve conducted, I think I can still give you an idea of what the medical examiner’s office does and how they are a vital asset to investigators and journalists.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the term, 'medical examiner,' was characters from the fictional television drama, Crime Scene Investigator (CSI). However, what happens on TV and what happens in real life is not always the same. In televison shows, we often see multiple medical examiners out of the lab during all hours of the day investigating death scenes. However, due to budget cuts, the real life investigators no longer go out at night to handle cases.

It is an examiner’s job to perform autopsies in order to determine the cause of death of an average Joe to a celebrity star. Examiners also work closely with organ donor facilities because they are concerned with human tissue donations. Also, any body that is unidentified is disposed of, meaning they are cremated.

Nearly everything a medical examiner produces is public record. The autopsy reports, the dead individual’s medical records, any evidence or paperwork filled out by the examiner, and any transcripts from county officials are made open to the public. All you have to do to obtain information from an official from the examiners office is file a request for a specific record or records and send the request to the office in a business envelope with TWO stamps on it. If the request is for a public record, the office will send the information back to the person asking for it.

What happens if someone asks for a record that is exempt? I’m glad you asked. There are certain records that are not available to the public, such as deaths currently under investigation, HIV tests results, and autopsy photographs, which up until recently WERE made available to the public. Autopsy photos are now denied to anyone except medical personnel because graphic photos have been used in newspapers without permission from the family of the deceased. The main person responsible for the rule change is Teresa Earnhardt, the widow of famous Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt. A newspaper was planning on using pictures from the crash that killed Earnhardt and Teresa Earnhardt sued in order to keep the photos sealed. For more information about the autopsy privacy bill, visit this Web site: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/motor/nascar/2001-03-21-autopsy-bill.htm