PIL on seeking to send postmortem certificate to authorites

A PIL seeking an interim direction to Deans of all Government Hospitals to send postmortem certificate of those deceased to the respective District Police superintendents as soon as possible with in two days for being handedover to the next of kin of the deceased was filed in the Madras High Court bench here today.
The petitioner N Saravanan, an advocate also sought a direction to the Health Secretary among others to instruct the Deans of the hospitals to follow the rules framed by the Medical Jurisprudence and toxicology while conducting autopsy and send the report to the respective SPs within two days.

Justices Sudhakar and V M Velumani directed the health secretary to consider the representation.
The Petitioner submitted that Government doctors who were doing necropsy or autopsy were doing the same in a wrong manner. This led to the acquittal of most of the murder cases by trial courts. Besides post mortem examinaiton should never be undertaken in medico legal cases unless there was a written order from the Police officer or the district magistrate.
The medical officer should carefully read the Police report and ascertain the cause of report. No unauthorised person should be allowed to be present at the autopsy and the medical officer should not discuss or give a copy of hte post mortem to un authorized person. There were 12 rules for external examination which included indentification of the body.

Only if all the rules were followed, the trial court would be able to arrive at the right decision, the petitioner submitted.