One of the legal blogs which I looked at commented on the fact that the pathologist who conducted the first post mortem on Ian Tomlinson, the man who died during G20 protests in London last year, had not known that there were allegations that he had been hit by a police officer. The implication of the comment was that this is clearly unsatisfactory.
It does however raise the intriguing question of whether a pathologist should ever know about the circumstances of a death which he is examining.
The concept of ‘blinding’ is central to the so-called gold standard for clinical trials of drugs, the idea being that knowledge by either the patient or any of their medical attendants of which drug they are getting introduces potential bias into the results. It is also considered vital that those who analyse the data should be ‘blind’ to which group got which treatment.
So perhaps we should insist that the pathologist who carries out a forensic post mortem examination, & all those concerned with analysing samples taken from the body, should have their potential for bias removed by being kept in ignorance of any allegations concerning the cause of death.
