The physician assistant as forensic investigator

Physician assistants are employed as forensic investigators at the Office of the Medical Examiner, Suffolk County, New York. We describe the educational qualifications of physician assistants and their valuable role in forensic medicine in Suffolk County.     

High cyanide level in a homicide victim burned after death: evidence of post-mortem diffusion.

Elevated levels of carbon monoxide and cyanide serve as evidence of intravital burning in fire victims. Hydrogen cyanide is released by combustion of nitrogen-containing organic material such as plastics and wool. We present a case of a man who died of haemopneumothorax caused by a stab wound. According to several eye witnesses the body was wrapped in a plastic sheet and burned 2 days after death with the aid of gasoline. No coal pigment was observed in the mucosa of the upper airways at autopsy. The blood sample taken from the pulmonary vessels 6 days after death disclosed a level of blood carboxyhaemoglobin of 4% and of blood cyanide of 10 mg/l. The low carboxy-haemoglobin level was consistent with the smoking habits of the victim. The thoracic cavity had been opened by burning of the intercostal soft tissue. This allowed hydrogen cyanide gas to enter the thoracic cavity and diffuse into the blood probably causing the high blood-cyanide level.     

OBSERVATIONS ON POLICE UNDERCOVER WORK*

Law enforcement officers are dependent upon citizens to alert them to criminal violations of the law. When citizens do not willingly communicate information to the police or cannot be induced to do so, police officers themselves adopt fictitious identities of various types. This paper explores police undercover work, a form of covert law enforcement used to gather information about conduct external to the organization. Through interviews with supervisors and practitioners, the benefits and liabilities of the assignment for the officers and the organization are presented. The work enables the police to investigate citizens who are not suspected of criminal activity and therefore lends itself to abuse. The practice itself demands attention as the lack of operational guidelines, standardless selection of operatives, and loose supervision imperil the safety of officers and the rights of citizens.     

CRIMINAL PROPENSITIES,DISCRETE GROUPS OF OFFENDERS,AND PERSISTENCE IN CRIME*

Criminal propensity theorists argue that the causes of variation in offending behavior can be traced to variation in one or more causal traits. Other theorists contend that there is actually more than one type of offender and that more than one causal mechanism operates to explain offending behavior. In this article, some of the implications of these two positions are considered. Then, their congruence with recidivism data from a cohort of post-age-16 North Carolina institutional releasees (N = 848) is assessed, The analysis focuses specifically on whether the correlates of offending persistence are similar across two categories of individuals: those who experienced their first adjudication at an early age and those who were first adjudicated at a later age. In support of both positions, some similarities and some differences in the correlates of persistence were discovered. The differences, however, were only evident when the threshold for late first adjudication was set to age 12. When this threshold was raised to higher ages, the differences disappeared.