Maryland has a fully professional medical-examiner system, so of course a body could never be misidentified there:
A child who died in a car crash was misidentified as his younger brother, a mistake that his relatives discovered a week after the accident, state police said Monday.
Troopers confirmed that the boy who died in the May 29 crash was 7-year-old Christian Marshall and not his 4-year-old brother, Justin.
Justin, his other sibling, McKenna, 2, and his parents, Sheyna Marshall, 29, and James Marshall, 28, all of Washington, D.C., were seriously injured in the crash. One of the Marshall children was pronounced dead at the scene.
The misidentification occurred, police said, when James Marshall, the only parent able to talk with authorities after the crash, was told that the child killed in the crash had been sitting in the right rear of the car. Marshall said he was certain Justin had been sitting behind him.
Pointing out one mistake in a medical-examiner system obviously doesn't negate the argument that the system might have advantages over an elected-coroner system. But neither is using one mistake by a coroner justification for scrapping that whole system. There will be human error under any system, and the need is to recognize human imperfection and compensate for it as much as possible with state statutes. That's what the law is for.
HAT TIP to Indiana Parley
Comments
Thank you Leo for making such a critical point.
"There will be human error under any system, and the need is to recognize human imperfection and compensate for it as much as possible with state statutes."
Tracy Warner wondered why he recieved flack over his comments. I wrote "I do not want to sound like I do not care, but after working with people for 25 years in engineering, procedures alone do not stop mistakes. Machines do not stop making bad parts. People make mistakes. How many out there could perform a task 10,000 times and not make a mistake?
Have we approached a point of diminishing returns? What I mean by this is, will we increased the time it takes to perform the task, requiring more people or tests and costs by a large percentage of cost while only marginally improving the result. To eliminate the last 1% error you could spend 100% more."
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