A clash between prosecutors and forensic scientists in Minnesota bares a long-standing ethical dispute.
The case against Minnesota high school student Nicole Beecroft two years ago was horrid in itself. Beecroft, then 17, was charged with stabbing her newborn daughter to death after secretly giving birth in the laundry room of her mother’s home.
The case was front-page news and Beecroft was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to a life term.
But for Dr. Susan Roe, an assistant medical examiner for eight Minnesota counties, the gruesome details were only a part of what troubled her. “It was an awful, horrible experience,” she says of her involvement in the trial as a medical expert for the defense. “It’s not worth it.”
In retaliation for her testimony in the case, Roe says, prosecutors threatened to file a complaint against her with the state agency that licenses and disciplines doctors and to prevent her from teaching another class at the state crime lab where she has taught regularly for years.
During the Beecroft trial, Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom—head prosecutor in one of the eight counties for which Roe works—admitted sending an e-mail to Dr. Lindsey Thomas, Roe’s boss at the Minnesota Regional Medical Examin er’s Office in Hastings. Backstrom told Thomas she could lose her county job if she or her assistants continued to do defense work against his wishes and the county sheriff’s wishes.
The email so unnerved her, Roe says, that she abruptly withdrew from the case, hired a lawyer and left the state until the trial was over.
To many medical examiners, the Beecroft case and Roe’s trepidation sound familiar. They say they’ve been called names behind their backs and had their professional reputations besmirched. They say they have been subjected to intimidation tactics—subtle and overt—and threatened with the loss of their appointed public positions. Their tormenters, they say, are police and prosecutors who criticize them for doing consulting work for the defense.
The episode helped expose a deep—and apparently long standing philosophical rift between some prosecutors and law enforcement officials, on the one side, and much of the forensic science community on the other.
Some police and prosecutors tend to view government-employed forensic scientists, including medical examiners, not as independent experts but as members of the prosecution’s “team.” Medical examiners, for the most part, view themselves first and foremost as scientists, beholden not to one side or the other but only to the truth.
Incidents like this are the reason the National Association of Medical Examiners has a standard that calls for death investigations to be conducted independently of law enforcement officials and prosecutors. Such a policy, it says, “promotes neutral and objective medical assessment of the cause and manner of death.”
Link: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/csi_breakdown/