How are criminal experts able to determine which gunshot wound was first?
In: Biology
Typically they don’t. When you hear reports about who fired the fatal shot in the media those are usually just based on statements that the Defendant(s) made while being questioned.
In an actual trial who fired the fatal shot is more or less never relevant and that’s not what experts will try to determine. What’s relevant in a criminal trial is just whether or not you shot someone and whether the person was likely to die from that wound if it was left untreated. If you shoot someone in the finger and your friend shoots them in the head, then the fact that they probably wouldn’t have died from the finger wound *might* be a mitigating circumstance at sentencing.
The closest experts will come to figuring out when someone died is when a corpse is particularly brutalized. In that case the expert will give an opinion on how likely it is that the person was still alive when a particular wound was inflicted. In that very rare case where whether a wound was inflicted while the person was alive or not is relevant to a charge of desecrating a corpse.
For example, if a corpse is stabbed and dismembered an expert might say “well the person would have died within a few minutes from the stabbing wounds and it would have taken a few hours to dismember the body so they were probably dead by the time that started.” Because the dismemberment occurred after death, its a separate crime from the murder.
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