Estimation of time since death through electric and chemical excitability of muscles.

Electric and chemical excitability of muscles present a supravital reaction which is of major importance in achieving a more precise estimating of the time since death in the early post-mortem period. The purpose of this paper is to examine the electric and chemical excitability of the muscles in cases with a known time of death, in order to determine their importance in the estimation of time since death. Electric excitability and chemical stimulation have been analysed in 50 cases with a known time of death, taken for autopsy at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminology in Skopje in the course of the year 2005. Testing of electric excitability of the muscles was done with a device for electric stimulation, providing a direct current of 50 mA intensity and 50 Hz frequency. Testing of chemical excitability of the eye pupils was done by injecting miotic Carbahol into the front eye chamber of the right eye and mydriatic Adrenalin HCl into the front eye chamber of the left eye. By analysis and processing of the obtained results, it was determined that the electric excitability of the muscles is of a major importance in determining the time since death within a post-mortem period of up to 10 hours and chemical excitability for a post-mortem period of up to 12 hours.

Inherited alleles revealing an incestuous paternity.

Some rape cases result in the pregnancy of the victim and if the case is not reported to the police after the act with a subsequent gynaecological examination of the girl and the taking of a vaginal swab, there is no way of connecting the rape case with the perpetrator, except by parentage determination using DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis after abortion or induced delivery. In order to solve the rape case of a minor girl of 14 years which resulted with pregnancy, where a 60-year-old man was accused of the rape, DNA was extracted from blood samples from the girl and the putative assailant and from the foetus after its induced delivery. The autosomal short tandem repeats (STR) typing for 15 different loci showed differences in 6 STR loci between the putative assailant as a father and the foetus, thus excluding the tested paternity. A large number of identical loci between the mother's and the child's genotype led us to consider the possibility of incestuous paternity. Analysis of DNA samples from the girl's father and brother clarified the case as brother-sister incest.

Post mortem cooling of the body and estimation of time since death.

Estimation of time since death in the field of forensic medicine expertise is an issue of high interest, especially in case of violent death caused by unknown executor. Post mortem cooling of the body is one of the pertinent parameters in estimation of time since death during the early postmortem period. Purpose of this paper is to analyze some of the existing methods, compare obtained results and determine which method gives more precise results of the estimation of time since death. This paper presents the analysis of 50 cases autopsied at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminology in Skopje, with known time of death. Rectal temperature was taken with digital thermometer. Simultaneously, environment temperature was measured as well as the body weight; it was recorded whether the body was covered or naked. In order to estimate time since death following methods were applied: Method I, Method II, Al-Alousi and Anderson and Henssge- nomogram. Comparison of the known time of death with the time obtained by the applied methods has shown a discrepancy of few hours. Comparison of results obtained by application of the above stated methods has shown that the Henssge-nomogram gives less discrepancy from the true time of death.

Allele frequencies for 15 STR loci in a population from the Republic of Macedonia.

Allele frequencies of 15 STR loci (D8S1179, D21S11, D7S820, CSF1PO, D3S1358, TH01, D13S317, D16S539, D2S1338, D19S433, vWA, TPOX, D18S51, D5S818, and FGA) were determined in a sample of 163 unrelated individuals from the Republic of Macedonia. AmpFISTR Identifiler Kit (Applied Biosystems) was used for PCR amplification. For all 15 loci, the combined matching chance is 6.6 x 10(18) and the power of exclusion is 99.999954%.