Trigood
Muse
- Joined
- Oct 30, 2006
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- 980
El Buscador,Hi Trigood,
The plus or minus hours comes more into focus when there are witnesses that saw Meredith alive for most of the hours of the TOD. That only leaves the 30 minutes or so at the end of the curve for her to have been murdered.
Hello!
I have yet to see one pathologist quoted as saying that he/she can determine TOD to within hours, much less a half-hour, based on these criteria.
In fact, in the book Time of Death, Jessica Snyder Sachs (2002) says the following (p 7):
"Twentieth-century pathologists added stomach contents to the factors that might suggest time of death. Unlike the three clocks set in motion at death, digestion slams to a halt. In theory at least, a medical examiner who knows the approximate time and quantity of the victim's last meal should be able to extrapolate time of death based on the rate that food might be expected to pass out of the stomach and into the intestines. In reality, the vagaries of stomach emptying in the soon-to-be-dead have proven even more problematic than the postmortem markers of rigor, livor, and algor." [emphasis added]
From p 45 of the same book, regarding the Nicole Brown Simpson murder:
"Did their [Nicole's stomach contents'] state of digestion indicate that the victim had been killed within two hours of her finishing dinner, as the L.A. medical examiner suggested? or more than four hours after, as countered by Simpson's 'Dream Team' expert, former New York City medical examiner Michael Baden. When challenged, both experts [for defense and prosecution] had to admit that the quantity and quality of stomach contents had long ago been dismissed as the most unreliable of all postmortem time scales." [emphasis added]
In addition, in this particular case, we are hindered by the fact that we don't know exactly when Meredith ate her pizza (5:30-6:30, possibly later? at pizza parties, people sometimes don't eat all at once, do they?), nor her dessert, nor exactly how large a meal she ate, which can greatly affect digestion. Nor do we know her specific pathology with regard to digestion, nor a dozen other factors that might have affected her digestion. Which is just to repeat the above, in my own words.
Thanks.
T.
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