Ask the forensic pathologist - or, Last chance to pontificate

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Dear Dopers,

I just posted this to the end of a thread in GQ:

Awww.
May I say a big Awww to all the Dopers.

Mr. Slant, I cannot belong to the Dope; the rules at my workplace would have me strung up. I only took the free guest month because somebody wanted to know how far you have to fall to die, and my memory is bursting with one of the few actual studies on that very topic. I shouldn’t really be posting but I think I can slide with General Questions since I am allowed to use the Net to find out work-related information. A lot of y’all here are far more informed than I am on - well on everything, but to make it work-legitimate, on tangentially forensics-related questions such as Pistols vs Revolvers (see thread). I know what bullets do to the body, but not much about what fires 'em. However, that doesn’t legitimate me paying money to belong to the Straight Dope through a work-protected proprietary server, and so, as of April 2, I’m gone.

I’ve been a lurker for a long time, and I have to say it takes a certain something to be a Doper (besides eloquence and time). I’m not sure I have this quality. Listen up, y’all, because I am struggling to express myself here. There must be a certain weird humility I’m not sure I possess. Arrogance, oh yeah, admixed; you have to be the sort of person who, when someone asks “How many people fantasize about you when they’re masturbating”, instinctively fires back, “All of them!” But you also have to be the type who takes a joke, has a thick skin, self-deprecates, admits to mistakes - in short, a real intellectual humility. I think I would be too tempted to pontificate to fit in.

Yours,
Gabriela

I thought, since I have five more hours on my work-protected server and it’s a quiet day (nobody died in a forensic way today), I’d see if anyone wants to know anything about anything I do. Squushy ucky is fine. Cannot comment on cases I have worked on that have not been adjudicated, but free to comment on anyone else’s cases reported in the media.

By the way: I found none of the images in today’s Threadspotting thread, Don’t Google This, either disgusting, or new.

I did this once on a radio show in Tennessee. I still remember the two questions I got: do fingernails grow after death, and do women have eleven or twelve ribs? Sheesh.

Gabriela

2

Hm. Well, dammit, we want you around. Eloquent or not, your expertise in such a field makes us all better because we learn from you. Repent and pay your 15 bucks.
I’ve heard that bodies floating in water are difficult/impossible to identify. Is this true? If so, exactly what makes them so unidentifiable?

3

Ooooh…also, do you watch CSI?

Is it accurate in any degree? Are you telling me there aren’t beautiful people working in crime labs all over the nation?!?!?!

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How often do you testify in criminal cases?

What’s your view of how effective (or ineffective) defense counsel’s tactics are at tripping you up, discrediting your conclusions, etc? Do you usually leave the stand feeling confident the jury got it, or fuming that the defense screwed up your presentation?

5

Nah, they all look like Abby on NCIS. :rolleyes:

Sign up on your home computer! Anyone who can come up with such an eloquent explanation of why he or she isn’t Doper Material – is Doper Material. Ironic, eh?

6

Can’t you post from home?

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When I read your replies in the gun standoff thread and noticed you were a guest, my first thought was “I hope she joins”. Still hoping.

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My guess is that her employer’s rules would prohibit that as well, but if not, I’d also encourage gabriela to join. If not perhaps she could be persuaded to write a staff report at least.

9

Sorry for delay! I went off to look at a baby heart and look at all these people!!

LeOrUsNaEver, whose name I adore, thank you for your stern and dominatrix-style kindness. (touched, wipes tear from eye) Dominator, if you’re male.

Ah, floaters: I can smell the bodies when you ask me that. That’s my problem, none of the rest of you read this in smell-o-vision.

LOUNE, the bodies bloat up as they decompose, and they decompose fast. The lips turn outwards, the eyes swell up, the entire body bloats into a whale. We have a saying that they all look like catfish because of the lips. The outer layer of the skin floats off, leaving the race unassessable to casual inspection. The smell is unbelievable.

So they’re not visually identifiable. That’s problem one. But we almost don’t go by visual ID any more unless it’s a matter of hours between death and finding by loved ones. So fingerprints? So there’s this thing called degloving, see. Not right away, but after a couple of days in water the whole skin of the hand sloughs off like a glove (and so does the skin of the feet), and floats off, carrying the fingernails (and toenails) with it. No prints.

Problem three. If they are in the Chesapeake Bay, the crabs eat them. Not all of them. Only the face and hands and superficial tissues. Crabs have to get a grip to eat. I have stopped eating crabs, myself. The life cycle is just too short, them to us to them.

Problem four. You can still ID the body if you have a good guess who it is, either by dental x-rays, or by chest or body x-rays, or by DNA. The DNA may not work because decomposition messes with it, but it may work. But all these problems mean you need to have a good guess who it is. If you don’t, two or three years in the back reaches of our cooler, then the sheriff will bury your unidentified self.

That help?

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Only once. I was too frustrated to keep watching.

They get all the science right, and none of anything real right. You got it on the nose with that beautiful people thing. But even more, their labs have infinite money, because all the results come back before the end of the show. You know how long it takes me to get alcohol and cocaine back on blood? Four weeks. SOmetimes six. If I have to rule out a complicated overdose on mixed methadone and antidepressants, twelve weeks. Try telling that to a family that watches a lot of CSI.

A friend I talked to at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting does DNA for a living. She has a private research project running on DNA from her family. Her own family is bugging her because it’s been two months and no results. She says, “The thing that shocks me when they deliver the DNA results is the lab people are wearing the same clothes!” In her lab, you’d need to sleep in your clothes for twenty weeks to deliver the results in the same clothes in which you took the request. And then you wouldn’t look at all CSIish.

Also, to the great laughter of our real forensic techs and medicolegal investigators, the CSI guys get assigned to ONE case at a time, they follow that case through all the way to its conclusion, they do ALL the tests involved in it rather than handing the stuff off to competent people to test, and they are never asked to handle anything else.

Speaking of great laughter, nobody in CSI seems to have our universal gruesome sense of humor.

The other thing about CSI is sociology. CSI implies that guys who make thirty thousand dollars a year get to tell other people what they should do. For earnest young people sitting watching TV, trying to decide what field they should go into, dangling that false lure in front of them is just not fair.

Do you watch TV shows about your field?

Gabriela

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I testify about twice a month. Sometimes twice a week, sometimes not at all for six weeks. I get handfuls of subpoenas; the vast majority of cases are continued or plead out; I probably testify once for every 15 subpoenas I get.

Lawyers who try to talk to regular doctors find the regular doctors are afraid to talk to them (although I bet not QtheM!). So they subpoena them to get them to call them. It’s like writing a prescription for me.

The defense is not trying to trip me up or discredit me. They are trying to win their case. Sometimes the only way to do that is to make me look stupid, but it’s not nearly as often as you’d think. If I’m describing the holes that bullets made through a person, often they’re not interested in that at all. Prosecution will usually try to make me look good because I make the jury gasp, but that’s not a guarantee either, particularly if I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I like to think of myself as not a prosecution witness. Or a defense witness. Though it’s hard if one side tends to butter you up, and the other doesn’t. Just the facts (and my opinions), ma’am.

It’s not personal, either; not at all. Sometimes defense will make me look stupid for one line of questioning if they need to discredit something I said because it tends to convict their client. Then a second later they’re calling me “Doctor” respectfully, and referring to my expertise, because they need me to look smart while I explain to the jury that the dead guy was high on cocaine and drunk, and that helps their self-defense explanation.

I only get to see one little tiny piece of the trial: my piece. I leave the stand confident that the jury got my piece. One thing I look for: the inevitable thirty-something blonde yearning at me with the “You go, girl!” look on her face, the two guys in Pendleton shirts looking thoughtful and nodding intelligently, and the ancient black grandmother gazing in shock at me with that “This is not right!” look. If I see that, I know I’ve gotten through to them.

I’m kind of glad I don’t have to know if the jury has gotten the whole case the way I see it or not. I don’t decide who’s guilty (except in child abuse homicides where I often know, alas). I let the jury decide who’s guilty. Helps me to sleep at night, doncha know.

12

I am so honored and flabbergasted that the Poster Known as Twickster has spoken to me that I must collapse into custardy silence.

13

Not on the computer at home much. Could, I guess. Would always be catching up to threads long gone past. Also, see first explanation of why I lack the essential Doper quality to survive.

14

Actually, yes. It does help. And dominator, thank you.
By the way, I’m a college student. I think I might watch some tv shows on my occupation, except I haven’t really got an occupation yet. I’ve got so many damned interests that, if I stayed in school for them all, I’d be forty by the time I graduated.
I had heard of a few of the things concerning the floaters and the CSI talk. I figured I’d get your take on the CSI because you’re convenient, and the floaters because you’re…well…close to it and I should ask you, dammit.
In my opinion, we need more of your folk around, not less. Time isn’t necessarily a matter either. Just because most of the membres seem to have cats doesn’t mean you need to tend to the Dope as if it were a cat.

How long do you keep bodies around for? Additionally, what was the last thing you saw that made you do a double-take?

15

Awwwww…

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You know, we’re going to SO butter you up until you relent and join.

You might as well save us the time AND the butter.

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Tell me about your educational background. Is it a ton of school? How long into you education before you find out if you have “the right stuff” to deal with dead folks all the time?

I could read stuff like this all day. I wanna be you!!!

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Uh. Staff is way above my head. Mods and stuff like that. Gods of the Boards. Near devotees to the actual Cecil and His Disciple, Ed. Hi Opal, and all that. (Not that I’d know what that means)

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You?? Are a college student? As in … twenty? How the hell do you know all the things you know?!

(thinks of what she knew in college - rather, what she didn’t know - slinks away and hides her head in shame)

We try not to keep bodies around for very long. Smell bad, take up space in the big cooler. If they’re really unidentified, six months of effort and then we get the sheriff to bury them in what is colloquially known as Potter’s Field.

The last thing that made me do a double take was nine healing broken ribs in a three-month-old who I was sure was going to be a SIDS. With new fractures through two of the old fractures.

20

<snork>