Getting away with murder can be easy for those in the medical profession due to the lack of critical investigative strategies used by medical examiners.

Stefan Timmermans, professor of sociology at UCLA, specializes in studying the role of individuals critical to investigating human fatalities.

“Medical examiners must have good relationships with the surrounding medical community,” Timmermans said. “They naturally don’t think to list the doctor as a possible suspect.”

Timmermans, who spoke in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union on Wednesday, described the importance of his research in revealing areas in which medical examination fails to accurately solve crime mysteries, specifically medical homicides.

“I am a big fan of a strong forensic system, but I think there are ways to improve,” he said. “While I seem critical, I just want to illustrate how getting away with murder stems from the good element of our investigation system.”

Timmermans said forensic examiners tend to carry three general ideologies that appear just, but they can handicap their investigation process.

“Examiners carry idea the people are good, they fear making mistakes and they talk out of guilt or pride,” Timmermans said. “These beliefs, instilled by our society and by their own moral desires, can cloud their ability to correctly determine a homicidal incident in a hospital environment.”

Areas in which murders are easily misclassified by medical examiners include drug overdoses, poisoning and medical homicides performed by licensed practitioners. Timmermans described cases in which a medical examiner indicting a physician proved difficult. Examiners face stiff challenges when trying to solve cases when investigating potential homicides that occurred in medical facilities.

“Medical examiners have difficulties adopting a critical eye for medical professionals and believing they could commit murder,” Timmermans said. “A medical homicide can sometimes be complex and covered by various factors existing in physician records and the hospital environment.”

Some of those factors, Timmermans said, include triage activities, complex medical records, the high potential for natural death to have occurred, elevated existing mortality rate, “mercy killing” situations and rarely identified cases of prosecuting those in medical professions.

Timmermans said these “perfect crimes” tend to fall through the cracks of the investigation process.

“The career field of medical examination needs better leadership and has experienced systemic erosion,” Timmermans said. He emphasized that we need to be certain of the results of each case.

“We need to look carefully at the system and sharpen the critical eye of our forensic training.”

Stefan Timmermans’s recent publication, “Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths,” describes the plight of the forensic examination community to improve its critical eye for suspicious homicidal events.