The Case For An Autopsy: Who Decides?

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Nebraska a 56-year-old man dies alone in his apartment. He seemed to be in good health and his family wants to know what happened. A police officer decides the man died of "Natural Causes" so no autopsy is performed. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack talk about legal death investigation and who makes the call when it comes to the "Manner of Death".

Transcribe Highlights

00:00.00 Introduction

04:38.56 Story of regret

10:35.89 Things that appear to be "natural"

15:35.28 When the coroner is elected position

20:18.72 Who makes a great legal death investigator

25:37.62 Determining manner and cause of death

30:50.66 Discussion of Coroner state

35:20.27 What qualifies a police officer to determine "natural causes"?

37:06.32 Conclusion

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Moore.
0:06.0	The old adage, once bitten twice shy, holds a different meaning when you consider that most of the time, as a death investigator, you get one shot at what you're doing.
0:21.6	You can make decisions over the course of your career that not only have a certain cringe
0:29.6	factor to them relative to the decisions that you made as a death investigator, but can impact family members and even local citizenry based upon
0:44.5	that choice that you made as a government official moving forward that will change the dynamic,
0:52.6	the landscape of how people view not only your office, but death investigation overall.
1:00.5	Some of these decisions remain with us, and like everybody out there, I have a couple over the course of my history, that have in fact haunted me and still haunt me to this day.
1:13.6	I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks.
1:19.6	All right, so right out of the box, if you're going to tell me, Joe, that there is something that haunt you to this day that happened while you were in the course of your job,
1:30.8	you have something like that, even now?
1:34.2	Yeah, yeah, still to this day.
1:36.3	And it's kind of one of these, I don't know if I can actually call it an anomaly, but I'd say that it is.
1:47.3	And if you want me to run it down to you, I run it down to you very briefly here.
1:51.5	Actually, now I need you to run it down for me.
1:54.1	It's not a want.
1:55.0	It's a need.
1:56.0	Well, here's the thing.
1:58.7	I got a call to a private residence.
2:03.6	This is when I was still working in New Orleans.
2:06.8	And I can't recall if I've told the story before, but it doesn't matter.
2:12.5	I'll tell it for the purposes of kind of illustrating what we're about today.
2:16.7	I got a call, and this was very early on in my career.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -52 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.