ABSTRACT
The role of the medical examiner (ME) is to serve as a medicolegal expert investigating the cause and manner of death in suspicious, unexplained, and unnatural deaths. The forensic autopsy is a unique tool in the ME's arsenal. An ME is a medical doctor, usually a pathologist and preferably a board-certified forensic pathologist. The outbrief is an opportunity to confirm opinions the ME may have voiced during the autopsy. The ME will often depend on the crime scene investigator, death scene investigator, or their own ME's investigator to respond to the scene and record the information of the decedent in situ and present this contextual information back to them. The ME may render an opinion as to the time since death, also known as the postmortem interval. The ME may use the stomach contents of the deceased and the passage of food through the bowel to help determine the postmortem interval.
