Why Is The “Official” Cause Of Death Not Always An Accurate Picture?
Attorney Cameron Sehat has taken a particular liking to the medical aspect of cases, particularly when it comes to understanding and explaining the medico-legal feature related to physical and psychological injuries stemming from a third party’s misconduct.
Sometimes when a person dies immediately after a physical altercation with the police and the person’s blood test positive for substances, the county medical examiner will rubber-stamp the cause of death and claim the death was solely due to substance intoxication even with nominal amounts of drugs in their system. This is intended to distract from the conduct of the police officer’s use of force which immediately precipitated the death of a person.
It is therefore important to understand both the science and mechanism of death and have a good command of the medicine in order to demonstrate that the county coroner’s rubber-stamped cause of death in the autopsy report is incorrect. For example, more often than not, whenever a person dies in the custody of police officers or jailers, and a substantial use of force was applied immediately preceding the death, seldom will a county coroner attribute the use of force as an additional cause of death; all it takes is for the person’s toxicology test to test positive for drugs for the cause of death to be exclusively “death due to drug intoxication”. Therefore, it is of utmost importance, in cases of police excessive force during which a person dies after a significant amount of force is used but where the person was also under the influence of an intoxicant, to prove the coroner’s cause of death left out a vital use of force as another contributory cause of death. These are challenging cases as the county coroner, who sometimes is also employed by the offending police agency, will likely be biased in favor of law enforcement, and will seldom impute fault upon the agency for causing the death. Therefore, you have to master an understanding of the medical aspect of the case in order to go toe-toe with professional witnesses who are trained to testify with a bias against your case.
