In many/most police departments, the coroner is the person with final say about whether or not a death was a murder. Like other unaccountable government bureaucrats, coroners can be pretty bad at their jobs, if for no other reason than that there is no one to stop them from being incompentent.
You might wonder why it’s not the detective’s job to decide whether to open an investigation. And often it’s because the detective is graded on the percentage of cases they’re able to solve. If detectives were given the responsibility of determining which cases of theirs merited investigation, they might try to avoid investigating cases that seemed more difficult.
Still, the coroner’s job is hard, and they will naturally want to keep good rapport with the people they’re working with every day. So if there are odd or bizarre features making a death suspicious—a broken window, a recent threat—those
circumstances can fail to make it to their report, and what was once an obvious homicide can vanish into thin air.
As a grad student in neuroscience I got the opportunity to sit in on some forensic histology, and it was really fascinating. Occasionally you can figure out quite insightful things about cause of death from looking at brain samples under a microscope. Other times you get a simple “yep, looks like this sample approximately agrees with the estimated time of death, nothing unusual here.”
In many/most police departments, the coroner is the person with final say about whether or not a death was a murder. Like other unaccountable government bureaucrats, coroners can be pretty bad at their jobs, if for no other reason than that there is no one to stop them from being incompentent.
You might wonder why it’s not the detective’s job to decide whether to open an investigation. And often it’s because the detective is graded on the percentage of cases they’re able to solve. If detectives were given the responsibility of determining which cases of theirs merited investigation, they might try to avoid investigating cases that seemed more difficult.
Still, the coroner’s job is hard, and they will naturally want to keep good rapport with the people they’re working with every day. So if there are odd or bizarre features making a death suspicious—a broken window, a recent threat—those circumstances can fail to make it to their report, and what was once an obvious homicide can vanish into thin air.
As a grad student in neuroscience I got the opportunity to sit in on some forensic histology, and it was really fascinating. Occasionally you can figure out quite insightful things about cause of death from looking at brain samples under a microscope. Other times you get a simple “yep, looks like this sample approximately agrees with the estimated time of death, nothing unusual here.”