Forensic Exhumations Research Articles

Retrospective analysis of 258 consecutive forensic exhumations with emphasis on causative agents/cause of death.

Abstract:
 Introduction: Exhumation is the removal of the corpse from its grave for determination of the cause of death. All the exhumation cases are authorized by the Judicial Magistrate are appropriate authority under section 176 CrPC (code of criminal procedure). There are other religious, social and cultural reasons the exhumation is carried out in different parts of world.
 Objective: To analyse and evaluate the findings from exhumed bodies and the factors which play role in the uncertainty in the determination of the cause of death.
 Methodology: This retrospective observational study performed for 258 consecutive forensic exhumations performed at Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, PUMHSW, Nawabshah in district from 2017 to 2019. These corpses were evaluated retrospectively on the basis of the autopsy report and police papers. The demographic information, causative factors and relevant data retrieve and analyzed using SPSS ver.19. The purpose of the present study was to analyze and evaluate the findings, their causative agents observed on the exhumed bodies and the factors which play role in the uncertainty in the determination of the cause of death.
 Results: There were 200 males and 58 were females. The causative agents included were blunt/sharp force and firearms. 242 cases were from urban and 16 were from rural area. The maximum cases of exhumation were 228 having >42 years and minimum were 30 <50 years. Due to advanced stage of decomposition, the marks of violence on soft tissues were not observed, and the internal organs were also in a state of decomposition. Histopathology and toxicology reveal negative results.
 Conclusion: Delayed exhumation due to lengthy legal procedure, results in decomposition and disputed cause of death. The success rate in challenged cases depends mostly on the duration of exhumation, condition of the soil, regardless the cause, frequency of such claims is on rise. 
 Keywords: Exhumation, grave, dead bodies, Autopsy, facial identification, false claims on cause of death.

Democratising Collective Memory Through Forensic Exhumations in Spain

Following the close of Spanish Civil War (1936–39) a dictatorship was installed by Francisco Franco which saw his narrative of the conflict embedded in the landscape of an ideologically divided nation through monuments and mass graves. The dictatorship was followed by the period of Transition (1975–81) whereby amnesty was negotiated leaving the crimes of the past ensconced in private memory. The recent wave of exhumations of mass graves aim to shed light on the hidden buried world containing legacies of Spain's recent past. This paper examines the experiences of participants in exhumations with expertise in the disciplines of history, archaeology, forensics, and psychology. It contrasts their narratives of silence and lack of awareness about Spain's mass graves with the work of exhuming the Disappeared, understood by members of the exhumation movement as a pedagogical mechanism of social memory that operates through the resignification of the dead as a counternarrative of the past.

Sepur Zarco, Guatemala: “Bodying Forth” and forensic aesthetics of witnessing in the courtroom and beyond

AbstractDrawing on long‐term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that emerges in the declarations of the different parties, as they conjure up Dominga Cuc Coc, a local Maya Q'eqchi’ woman, on the riverbank washing army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation. ‘Bodying forth’ is tied to performative forensic imaginaries and forensic aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond. It challenges the epistemological underpinnings of law and science to re‐center the necessary differential and differentiated accounts of the witnesses and their appeals to justice.

The Melancholy of Bones: Forensic Exhumation as an Elegiac Transformative Experience

AbstractSince the early 1990s, forensic exhumation of mass graves in the wake of violent conflict has become an increasingly important humanitarian intervention. Exhumation has two stated aims: to document evidence of atrocity for judicial proceedings and to return bodies to families to bring psychological closure. Exhumation is premised on the idea that opening graves bring mourners’ closure, but little research has been done to examine how humanitarian exhumation affects the families of the missing. In this article, I consider the return of the exhumed remains to families and reflect on the relationship between mourning, violence, and transformation. I argue that humanitarian forensic exhumation is underwritten by a model of grief derived from Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholy. Drawing on fieldwork in Argentina, I claim that this model ultimately proves inadequate to capture the varieties of experience described by families of the missing. I develop “elegiac transformation” as a theoretical lens to explore experiences of exhumation. While forensic discourse emphasizes “closure,” the return of bodies to families may be more generatively conceived as opening memories, old wounds, and new possibilities for healing, transforming its participants. [death forced disappearance mourning forensic exhumation and transformative experience]Résument Desde la década de 1990, la exhumación forense de fosas comunes después de conflictos violentos se ha convertido en una intervención humanitaria de creciente importancia. La exhumación tiene dos objetivos explícitos: documentar evidencia de atrocidades para los procedimientos judiciales y devolver los cuerpos a las familias para lograr un cierre psicológico. La exhumación se basa en la idea de que la apertura de las fosas produce un cierre psicológico para los dolientes, pero se han realizado pocas investigaciones para examinar cómo afecta la exhumación humanitaria a las familias de los desaparecidos. En este artículo, abordo el tema de la devolución de los restos exhumados a las familias y reflejo la relación entre el duelo, la violencia y la transformación. Sostengo que la exhumación forense humanitaria está suscrita por un modelo de duelo derivado de la distinción de Freud entre el duelo y la melancolía. Basándome en el trabajo de campo en Argentina, afirmo que este modelo finalmente resulta inadecuado para aprehender las variedades de experiencias descritas por las familias de los desaparecidos. Elaboro la "transformación elegíaca" como una lente teórica para explorar las experiencias de la exhumación. Mientras que el discurso forense hace énfasis en el "cierre", el retorno de los cuerpos a las familias puede ser conceptualizado de manera más generativa como la apertura de recuerdos, antiguas heridas y nuevas posibilidades de sanación, transformando a sus participantes.

How Francisco Franco governs from beyond the grave: An infrastructural approach to memory politics in contemporary Spain

ABSTRACTFour decades after the end of the Franco dictatorship, many Spaniards continue to question their country's claims to full democracy. Although Spain is now governed by popularly elected governments, citizens still experience the coercive effects of the dictatorship's policies in their daily interactions with the built environment, state institutions, and even their fellow citizens. These heterogeneous sites through which the dictatorship makes its presence felt constitute an infrastructure of memory that facilitates and impedes the circulation of past experience. In this context, people enact memory politics not only by contesting narratives of the past but also, first and foremost, by dis‐ and reassembling the physical, institutional, and social entanglements that undergird democratic politics. [infrastructures, cultural memory, democratic politics, forensic exhumations, archives, Spain]

Procedural and political aspects of forensic exhumation in Brazil

Exhumation may be defined as the legally sanctioned excavation and recovery of the remains of lawfully buried or – occasionally – cremated individuals, as distinct from forensic excavations of clandestinely buried remains conducted as part of a criminal investigation and from unlawful disinterment of human remains, commonly referred to as bodysnatching. The aim of this article is to review the role of exhumation – so defined – in the activities of CEMEL, the Medico-Legal Centre of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School-University of São Paulo, in international, regional and local collaborations. Exhumations form part of routine forensic anthropology casework; scientific research in physical and forensic anthropology; and forensic casework conducted in collaboration with the Brazilian Federal Police; and are carried out as part of humanitarian investigations into deaths associated with the civil–military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. This article aims to offer a non-technical summary – with reference to international comparative information – of the role of exhumation in investigative and scientific work and to discuss developments in their historical and political context.

Analysis of Twenty Cases of Forensic Exhumation with Emphasis on Cause of Death

Analysis of Twenty Cases of Forensic Exhumation with Emphasis on Cause of Death

Technologies of the Afterlife

In August 2011, I attended the exhumation of Severiano Clemente González, conducted by the Forum for Memory in the Castilian town of La Toba, Guadalajara. Mr González was one of the over 130,000 civilian victims of the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Even after Spain’s democratic constitution in 1978, most families could not recover their loved ones, owing to an unofficial ‘Pact of Silence’ whereby major political actors agreed not to legislate, litigate or discuss the still controversial past in the public sphere (Encarnación 2014). Since 2000, however, civil society organisations such as the Forum for Memory and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) have been leading a series of forensic exhumations – modelled after similar state-led interventions in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe (Ferrándiz 2010; Rubin 2014).

Transitional Justice against the State: Lessons from Spanish Civil Society-Led Forensic Exhumations

Inspired by forensic exhumations that have occurred in the context of transitional justice processes elsewhere, Spanish civil society associations since 2000 have helped relatives of the disappeared locate, exhume and honor those who were killed in the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing Francisco Franco dictatorship. In the process, they have creatively adopted, applied and reinterpreted practices originally developed for state-led democratic transitions to civil society initiatives. In this article, I explore the ways transitional justice concepts take on a social life beyond their juridical applications. In so doing, I take these exhumations as an opportunity to examine some of the tensions between the bureaucratic state-led models of transitional justice that inspired Spanish activists and the civil society reinterpretations that mark forensic practice in contemporary Spain. The practice of Spanish organizations offers new avenues for understanding and ameliorating the tense relationship between the bureaucratic and legal needs of forensic exhumations and the desires and expectations of victims.2

Inhabiting Unfinished Pasts: Law, Transitional Justice, and Mourning in Postwar Peru

This article examines the possibility of mourning and justice without the body and its implications for political community in the aftermath of state atrocities. It focuses on the forensic exhumation of clandestine mass graves at the military base of Los Cabitos, the headquarters of the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in the Peruvian south-central Andes. These procedures uncovered technologies of body disposal used by the military that made impossible the identification of victims of state terror. In the face of this impossibility, relatives of the disappeared have appropriated the unknown remains to articulate forms of political mourning and justice that speak truth to power through ordinary languages and tropes.

International Forensic Investigations and the Human Rights of the Dead

This essay asks whether dead bodies have human rights, and if so, what philosophical foundations those rights have. With equal importance, it considers how these rights would operate in a real-world area of human rights practice, the forensic exhumation of mass graves. It argues that human rights for the dead are philosophically unworkable and irreconcilable with the practical limitations of forensic work; therefore, we should not think of the dead as having human rights. However, this conclusion does not end discussion about what forensic investigators do for dead bodies. Rather, it makes room for a modest but rich sense of how exhumation can restore the identity, physical location, and care that have been denied to victims of atrocity.

The role of science in the human rights movement.

“Scientists have contributed valuably in making human rights a reality for all. Notable scientific contributions to human rights include the forensic exhumation of mass graves, the use of DNA evidence to identify victims of mass killings, the introduction of information management techniques to illuminate large-scale human rights violations, and, more recently, the use of satellite imagery to document the destruction of communities in remote locations.” [Rubenstein and Younis 2008)]. As a human rights lawyer and a consumer of science, Mr. Rubenstein will discuss the contributions of science to human rights challenges, and the importance of the scientific community becoming a constituency for human rights. He will address head-on some of the greatest misconceptions about human rights work, including the charge that it is too “political” as well as steps needed to assure that scientific work undertaken with human rights organizations and is conducted consistent with scientific traditions of impartiality and independent inquiry. Finally, he will demonstrate how the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition can be used as a vehicle for the application of scientific skills, to reinforce the commitment, and to amplify the voices of scientists working toward the realization of human rights for all.

Proving Genocide?: Forensic Expertise and the ICTY

This article works towards developing a theoretical framework outlining the premises and parameters under which forensic experts operate during various stages of international criminal investigations and the presentation of expert witness testimony in court. With reference to law and science literature, the article explores the reasons for undertaking resource-intensive forensic investigations; secondly it outlines the ways in which evidence is gathered and interpreted, the process of constructing ‘forensic truth’; and finally it examines what happens to ‘forensic truth’ once it enters the legal arena. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and its activities are used to illustrate the issues involved during the ‘forensic expertise meets international law’ interface. Specifically the forensic exhumations conducted around the Srebrenica events of July 1995 and their use in the Krstić trial serve to contextualize the debate.

Estimating the length of incomplete long bones: forensic standards from Guatemala.

We report on new standards for estimating long bone length from incomplete bones for use in forensic and archaeological contexts in Central America. The measurements we use closely follow those defined by Steele ([1970] Personal Identification in Mass Disasters; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution), but we add several new landmarks. We measured the femur, humerus, tibia, and fibula of 100 Maya skeletons (68 males, 32 females) recovered from forensic exhumations. We derived the equations by regressing bone segment length on bone length, and solved for bone length to maximize the utility of the equations for taller populations. We generated equations for all segments that were significantly correlated with bone length for males, for females, and for both sexes combined, but accepted only regressions with r(2) > 0.85 as reliable. Landmarks defined by muscle attachment sites were more variable in location than landmarks on articular architecture; thus we retained few equations that use these landmarks. We tested the male and combined sex equations on 36 males of unknown ethnicity exhumed from a military base in Guatemala, and found that the equations performed satisfactorily. We also evaluated the performance of equations by Steele ([1970] Personal Identification in Mass Disasters; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution) and Jacobs ([1992] Am J Phys Anthropol 89:333-345) on the Maya bones, and conclude that significant population variation in long bone proportions hinders their application in Central America.