Thursday, December 4, 2008

Inactive, Unclassified

Five years after the death of Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna, the case is 'inactive'

Janis on one of the city's hundreds of "unclassifed" deaths

Judge's son pleads guilty: some apples actually fall pretty far from the tree

3 comments:

Baltimore_Yeti said...

A few thoughts on the death of 23-year-old daughter Jill Conklin.
As a parent, my heart weeps for Gina Adams. With all the advances in science I find it hard to believe that any medical examiner can not tell what a person died of in great detail. Just watch some of those shows on the Discovery Channel. I saw one where researchers examined a 2000 year old mummy and could tell, what the mummy died of. So why not a girl that had been dead for a few days, weeks or months ?

Sometimes I feel the answer is the death of this girl was not a high enough priority. The higher the priority the more resources are allocated to solving the crime. If anyone has any doubt of what I just said, think about it. Police departments are on a strict tight budget with limited time and resources available. This is a sad fact of life. As long as this continues to be the norm we will have more and more unsolved deaths. And this increases the odds of not getting caught. Criminals start to thing that they can't lose, the odds favor them, so they take the gamble.

ppatin said...

"Police departments are on a strict tight budget with limited time and resources available. This is a sad fact of life. As long as this continues to be the norm we will have more and more unsolved deaths."

True, however the police department is not responsible for determining the cause of death. It's the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner that determines if a death is natural, accidental, homicide or suicide. If you're interested in learning more about the relationship between the police and OCME I suggest reading "Homicide" by David Simon. It's an old book at this point, but I learned a huge amount from it.

Baltimore_Yeti said...

I will check out the book.
The same budget contrants apply to the OCME as well. I stand corrected on that point.