Exhumation and identification: A case report.

The term exhumation is restricted to legally digging out the body from the grave after burial. The objectives of disinterment can vary in various cultures as well as countries and requirements vary from place to place However, most cases of exhumation occur because there is a request from a magistrate to carry out an autopsy to gain essential forensic evidence. The paper discusses such a case of 10 year old girl who was buried after committing sexual assault and strangulation. After the passage of about two years the victim’s body was retrieved from the place identified by the accused persons who confessed to the crime. The body of the victim was identified by her mother from a small piece of under slip and other articles she was wearing. The paper discusses various aspects of exhumation and also stresses the importance of careful examination and recording of personal articles, belongings etc of the victim recovered from/with the body during autopsy examination.

Original research paper correlation of stature of adult with the length of clavicle.

Forensic anthropology can play an important role in the identification process. Besides determination of race, sex and age of the unknown individual, estimation of stature enhances the reliability of identification. It is easier to get those data when the whole body or entire skeleton is available to the forensic anthropologist. However, in cases of deliberate mutilation and disposal in parts, interference by wild animals and bomb blast by terrorist attack, recovery of the whole body or complete skeleton may not be possible. In those cases, the forensic anthropologists have to give his opinion based upon the available supplied skeletal remains. Although approximate stature of the individual can be estimated from most of the long bones using either multiplication factors or regression formulae, studies on estimation of stature from clavicle are limited. In the present autopsy based study, an attempt has been made to correlate stature of individual with the length of clavicle.

Estimation of post-mortem interval from the changes in vitreous biochemistry.

Accurate estimation of the post-mortem interval is an important research topic in Forensic Medicine. But unfortunately all methods till now in use to determine the time of death are to a degree unreliable. A vitreous Biochemical change, in the post-mortem period has been researched for many years, but till date it has not been practically used. Various authors have found the co- relation of vitreous humour Na+, K+ & Ca²+ concentration, with increasing post-mortem interval. Some authors have used flame photometry method, while others have used Beckman coulter analyser method. Some authors have found changes in Vitreous Na+, K+ & Ca²+ concentration, between the two eyes of the study subjects and gender variation was also noticed. But still various lacunae exist in the present knowledge because of which estimation of post-mortem interval from vitreous biochemistry is not being practically used till date. So this topic needs further research to bring it in to routine use.