Dr Marc Trabsky1
1La Trobe University
Medico-legal investigations into sudden, unnatural, violent and accidental deaths require coroners to ascertain the identity of the deceased, determine the cause of the death and make recommendations for reducing the occurrence of preventable deaths. A key element of their investigation has been the invasive autopsy, which is performed by a forensic pathologist if a coroner deems it necessary to achieve the statutory objectives of coronial law, and which has become in recent decades a site of contestation, especially for families of the deceased who oppose post-mortem dissections due to religious or cultural beliefs. Since the late twentieth century, forensic imaging technology has offered the ideal of a virtual autopsy.
This paper examines how forensic imaging technology impacts coronial investigations in Australia. It focuses on how post-mortem computed tomography (pmCT) has been used since the early twenty-first century to supplement or as a triage for invasive autopsies for the purposes of identifying the deceased and/or determining the medical cause of a death. Little is known however about how technological modifications to coronial investigation assist or hinder practitioners in fulfilling their statutory responsibilities under coronial law. If the use of pmCT is to be expanded in Australia, and in the future potentially supersede invasive autopsies, then it is critical to these debates that we examine the social and legal effects of the implementation of forensic imaging technology in coronial investigations.
Biography:
Dr Marc Trabsky is a Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe Law School, and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow on a project titled ‘Socio-Legal Implications of Virtual Autopsies in Coronial Investigations’ (DE220100064). He has published the award winning Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019).