Category: default || By jt3y

According to Saturday's Daily News, Dr. Cyril Wecht* has called for an inquest into the death of 39-year-old Gregory Green, the Hill District man who died June 30 after a brief police chase. (The story is online for subscribers only.)

Wecht was asked to consult on the case by Green's family. Reporter Ryan Kish quotes Wecht as saying that there was evidence of fresh bruises on Green's body, and that he did not die from "natural causes."

That appears to contradict preliminary reports attributed to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office which indicated that there were "no signs of injury."

However, Wecht acknowledges that he was not privy to the toxicology tests, and from my reading of Kish's story, Wecht is not alleging malpractice by city police; rather, he's arguing that whenever a suspect dies in police custody, an inquest is warranted.

I don't know enough about the details of this case to comment intelligently (which has never stopped me before) but I respect Wecht, and I tend to agree that an inquest would not cause any harm, and may actually do some good.

A more cynical person would claim that Wecht is trying to gain publicity and distract attention from his legal problems, but I don't tend to agree; his work on the Green case didn't even make the Pittsburgh papers, as far as I could tell.

I also know some law enforcement officers who consider Wecht "anti-police," and from my experience with Wecht, that isn't true, either.

I suppose we will have to wait and see what the final autopsy report from the medical examiner's office has to say.

And that's all I have to say about that. It's too hot to do anything else. The next jerk who tells me that they just love hot weather gets, in the words of the late Harry Secombe, a "punch up the conk."

* --- I was going to write "celebrity forensic pathologist, author and former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht," but I decided that anyone who hadn't heard of Cyril Wecht probably wasn't reading the Almanac. Or, possibly, they can't read.