Forensics: exact science or dramatised fiction? #9
Popular imagery of suicidal hanging presumes that the body must be hanging freely from the roof or wherever with eyes bulging out and the tongue protruding from the mouth. If the feet are touching the ground, people immediately suspect murder and conspiracy theories start proliferating.
Last year, a young, male film actor had committed suicide in Mumbai. The entire visual media started re-enacting the scene in the studios with dummies. Most of them insisted that because he was a nearly six feet tall man, his feet must have touched the bed and hence it could not have been a suicide. In other words, it should have been a murder, which was sought to be hushed up by powerful people including drug lords who did not want the truth to be known. Readers can easily recall how conspiracy theories abounded. His former girlfriend was accused of everything ranging from witchcraft to giving him unknown drugs to keep him perpetually sedated and stripped of any ability to make decisions for himself—much less to ask what drugs he was being given. There were allegations of the post mortem report having been fudged, and so on.
Ignorance about ‘partial hanging’
None of the ignoramuses in the media mentioned the word ‘partial hanging’ even once. Obviously, they had never heard of it—such is the level of ignorance.
Partial hanging, atypical hanging or incomplete hanging means death by hanging in which the body is not hanging freely and part of the body is touching the ground. Victims may be found in various positions including sitting, crouching, kneeling or lying down. In approximately 70% of all suicides by hanging, the body has direct contact of some kind with the surface below. It is not necessary for the body to hang freely.
Most people do not know that the carotid arteries and the jugular veins are so located that it requires very little force to compress (close, cut off or occlude) these vessels. Wolfgang Keil et al have shown that it requires just 1-2 kg (9.8 to 19 N) of force to close the jugular veins as they are closer to the skin. This is equivalent to the force need to lift 1-2 kg weight! The carotid arteries can be closed by just 5 kg (49 N) of force. Even the vertebral arteries can be closed by 30 kg (294 N).
How Murder can be disguised as suicide?
In India, it is common for young girls, particularly in rural areas, to be raped and murdered. After the murder, their bodies are hung from trees to make it appear that it was suicidal death. For added effect, the suspects spread rumours that the girls were of loose character and they committed suicide out of shame. Alternatively, they claim the incidents to be cases of honour killing by the family when they found out the real character of the girls. Manipulating the post mortem reports is child’s play for the police.
This is precisely what is suspected to have happened in 2014 in Katra Shahadatganj, Badayun, UP where two Dalit girls aged 14 and 15 respectively were found hanging from a tree. Besides screaming contradictions in the post mortem reports of two sets of doctors, bungling by the police and forensics was evident from the fact that at first, the district SP did speak of rape and subsequent hanging. A week later, the DGP of UP, however, claimed that one of the girls was not raped and that it could be a case of honour killing. Not to be left behind, the CBI claimed that due to heavy rains the graves of the girls along the river Ganga were submerged and hence, the premier agency of the country could not dig the graves for an exhumation of the dead bodies! Thankfully, a POCSO (Protection of Children Against Sexual Offences Act) Court rejected the CBI’s closure report in 2015. According to the last report on this matter in the public domain in June 2019, the case was still pending with the POCSO Court.
Scientific knowledge about death by hanging
Contrary to popular perceptions and the wrong notions held by ignoramuses amongst cops and forensics, all cases of hanging do not produce similar external features. All cases will not result in protruding tongues, for example. It all depends on what material has been used for ligature; how soft or broad it is; and how and where the knot has been positioned.
If the ligature and its placement are such that the jugular veins are compressed (closed, cut off or occluded) before the carotid arteries, the face will typically become engorged and livid as the brain is filled with blood that cannot drain out. There will be the classic signs of petechiae—little blood marks on the face and in the eyes from burst blood capillaries due to excessive blood pressure in the head. The tongue, in this case, may protrude due to the pressure of the noose on the base of it. On the other hand, if the ligature and its placement are such that the carotid arteries are closed, cut off or occluded or there is vasovagal shock, the face will typically be pale and bluish in colour and would not show petechiae.
Wolfgang Keil et al have shown that it is indeed very much possible for a person to be murdered by hanging and it is not necessary that the body must have injury marks. In such cases, corrupt cops and ignorant forensics can murder justice by passing them off as suicides, as we saw in the Badayun rape-cum-murder case.
If sufficient numbers of persons are involved in the murder, it can be a very smooth affair. In the worst-case scenario with just two or three murderers, the victim might struggle with them, may disturb the scene a little and inflict some injuries on the assailants. However, that is not a cause of worry to them. One person needs to twist the victim’s arms; and the other needs to heave him up, holding him from just above the knees for getting maximum height. The third person may then quickly slip the noose, and then the victim could be dropped with a jerk. The quick drop would ensure that the victim loses consciousness fast.
If the victim is fully-clothed, there would not be any injury marks at all created in the process of say, twisting his arms and heaving him up. The murderers could also sedate or intoxicate the victim to facilitate the whole process with just two men. The whole process is rather easy with children, young girls, women and the elderly but difficult with able-bodied men. From the above, it appears very much probable that the victims in the notorious Badayun rape case, being frails girls of 14 and 15 years, could have been easily overpowered and hanged.
It would need an extremely knowledgeable expert to make out the antemortem injuries in such cases. Since external signs could be missing, he will have to dissect the neck and look carefully for injuries to the cricoid cartilage and the upper trachea, or the presence of relevant haemorrhages in the soft tissues of the neck. I have never come across any doctor who looked for these things in the post mortem. In any case, if the victim has been temporarily incapacitated by a kick in the testicles or a punch in the solar plexus before hanging him, there would not be any sign of ante mortem injuries inside the neck structure during the autopsy.
If the murderers are clever, they can rub the material of the ligature onto the hands of the victim after the murder also. This will ensure that fibres of the ligature are found on his hands and that would further support the suicide theory for ignorant cops.
Indian cops and forensics generally do not know that suicide or murder can be camouflaged in the so-called ‘padded hanging’. In this, a soft, wide, protective material is placed between the instrument of suspension and the skin. It leaves hardly any trace of injury, or none at all, and the characteristic mark of hanging would be missing.
It is also possible that someone is first strangulated by a cord and then the same cord is used to hang him to simulate suicide. Unless an additional ligature furrow is clearly visible, it would be extremely difficult in an autopsy to distinguish antemortem injuries from post mortem injuries.
Murders by choking, strangulation, asphyxia, thoracic compression and burking
If an untrained person is strangling someone, he might try to block the nasal and oral openings also to prevent the victim from making noise. These leave tell-tale marks. However, it shall not happen in many cases. Laszlo Buris states that in cases of strangling by use of soft instruments (such as gloved hands or use of the forearm to squeeze the soft tissues) external injuries may not be seen.
There is a difference between deaths by strangulation and choking. In strangulation, you cut off the blood supply to the brain either by compressing the carotid arteries or the jugular veins. In choking you restrict his breathing. Strangulation is a standard technique in martial arts and there is no damage to any bone.
If you choke somebody lying in a prone position, you are liable to break the cervical vertebrae. There is another bone called the hyoid. It is also commonly fractured in choking. Conversely, if you find such fractures, they confirm choking.
The established scientific opinion in the world is that except in cases of an obstruction in the larynx or the other airways, in all other asphyxiation mechanisms, the cause of death cannot be proven on the basis of individual macroscopic findings of an external examination. Wolfgang Keil et al say that under certain conditions, there may be a complete absence of findings associated with asphyxiation. Scientists maintain that ‘asphyxiation’ as the cause of death constitutes a diagnosis by exclusion that is based on probability.
Thoracic compression is an obstruction of the movement of the thoracic diaphragm during breathing where the thorax is immobilized in the exhalation position. That is, the air has been expelled but it cannot be breathed in. This prevents fresh air from going into the lungs; and secondly, it reduces or halts the flow of blood from the head and neck region to the heart. Death by thoracic compression is seen frequently during stampedes.
Burking is the name given to thoracic compression brought about by the perpetrator sitting or kneeling on the victim, while simultaneously covering the mouth and nose. This is named after the serial killer William Burke who committed a series of murders in Edinburgh in 1828. Burke was believed to have straddled the chests of his victims, covering the mouth and nose during thoracic compression. This modus operandi produced few traces of traumatic violence. Burke then apparently sold the cadavers to schools of anatomy. Most Indian police officers and forensics neither know nor consider burking in complex violent assaults.
Indian forensic community is in the habit of passing off their hunch or guesswork as final and definitive expert opinion even as it is a scientific impossibility, as discussed above. The tragedy of the criminal justice system in India is that justice is thus denied in hanging cases to the common man, especially the underprivileged, as a result of ignorance, corruption or both.
