Articles Published by NIJ

After a five-year fact-finding mission, a multi-agency working group has identified a host of problems in the U.S. medical examiner/coroner system, but solutions remain elusive.

Research has found key areas within forensic science that are associated with higher rates of wrongful convictions. Addressing them should strengthen trust in our criminal justice system.

Study examines the impact of CT scans on workflow and tallies the cost savings of postmortem CT in lieu of full autopsy.

Determining sex, age, and other forensic information from the skeleton of a young person has stymied investigators for decades.

Development of blowflies on a body is a standard forensic measure of time since death, but temperature variations can alter that development and mislead investigators.

A new postmortem image database will be a resource for research in forensic anthropology, pathology, and radiology.

Scientific inquiry into the process of decomposition has studied a wide range of mammals and developed a fundamental understanding of the stages of decomposition, but forensic scientists should use caution in applying nonhuman data to human bodies.

Making imaging technologies available to forensic pathologists as common practice — although not without challenges — will help improve medicolegal death investigations in the United States.

In response to the National Academy of Sciences’ call for scientific data to support forensic evidence, researchers revised forensic anthropology procedures to include an “error metric” for the measurement of human skeletal remains.

Researchers look into the utility of postmortem X-ray computed tomography in supplanting or supplementing medicolegal autopsies.

Measuring carbon-14 levels in human tissue could help forensic scientists determine age and year of death in cases involving unidentified human remains.

The death investigation community searches for solutions for a fragmented system