Extensive soft tissue injuries as a cause of death.

The blunt trauma injury is the most common type, a pathologist encounter when doing medico-legal autopsies. Sometimes, while searching the main cavities of the body for the fatal injuries like lacerations and damages to the vital organs, we, the Forensic Pathologist commonly ignores the superficial small abrasions, bruises over the other parts of the body. Cutaneous injuries i.e. abrasions, contusions in most cases, are not fatal and are seemingly unimportant. However, soft tissue injuries not always are simple as mostly described in the literature but sometimes these injuries may be so extensive internally that leads to irreversible shock. In fact, these injuries prove fatal when taken collectively into consideration. Sometimes trivial circumstances lead to serious quarrel, resulting into death of the victim which apparently looking uninjured externally while conducting autopsy. Under such circumstances sometimes at primary health care centres the inexperienced autopsy surgeons are not in a position to correlate the superficial looking soft tissue injuries attributing towards death.

A drop of saliva de-codes the mystery of hanging body.

A Forensic Expert sometimes asked to provide his opinion from the documents alone, particularly when the allegations were raised on the investigations, and the postmortem. Spot examinations were carried out by other doctor(s) and Forensic Scientists respectively. In the instant case there were allegations made on the fellow sports student, coach, and the investigating agencies all in connivance to pronounce the death as of suicidal hanging instead of murder. It is well known that the criminals first kill the person and then hang him to simulate it as hanging. Whenever, alcohol is detected in the blood than it creates a lot of doubts, which result into allegations from the relatives. Beside the examination of clothes, the injuries like ligature mark, their shape, size and location etc., thorough reviewing of documents & photographs plays a pivotal role in reconstructing the scene of crime. This has an importance in forming a conclusive opinion as to the cause and manner of death. In this paper, opinion regarding cause and manner of death to be of ante-mortem hanging was ascertained on reviewing the post-mortem report, photographs showing dribbling of saliva and Forensic Science Laboratory reports.

Meticulous examination of body pays.

Owing to climatic conditions in tropical countries like ours, decomposition of bodies takes place rapidly, especially in hot and rainy seasons. It is very essential to make as thorough an examination as practicable, even in decomposed bodies, in order to find out the cause of death and manner of death, especially in a case where there is suspicion of foul play. When a dead body is recovered from sewer drainage in the stage of decomposition, the police are in dilemma about its cause of death and manner of death and the relatives are also having speculations about the cause of death of their near and dear ones. The case presented in this paper illustrates the importance of a thorough post-mortem examination and not just relying on the information furnished by the police. The authors stress that a thorough and meticulous examination of the body is the need of hour and if done meticulously, it pays.