Clash Between Prosecutors, Forensic Scientists Bares Long-Standing Ethical Dispute
Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Susan Roe
(Photos by Jason Wood)
The case against Minnesota high school student Nicole Beecroft two years ago was horrid in itself. Beecroft, then 17, was charged with stabbing her newborn daughter to death after secretly giving birth in the laundry room of her mother’s home.
The case was front-page news and Beecroft was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to a life term.
But for Dr. Susan Roe, an assistant medical examiner for eight Minnesota counties, the gruesome details were only a part of what troubled her. “It was an awful, horrible experience,” she says of her involvement in the trial as a medical expert for the defense. “It’s not worth it.”
In retaliation for her testimony in the case, Roe says, prosecutors threatened to file a complaint against her with the state agency that licenses and disciplines doctors and to prevent her from teaching another class at the state crime lab where she has taught regularly for years.
Prosecutors in the case deny that anybody on their side made any threats to Roe in conversations that Roe says took place during a pretrial conference with defense lawyers.
“I have no idea where she got that from,” says Assistant Washington County Attorney Heather Pipenhagen, one of two prosecutors in the case, “but I can assure you that it didn’t happen.”
The fact that Beecroft stabbed her newborn daughter was not in dispute. The central issue in the case was whether the child was alive when she did.
Continue reading “CSI Breakdown” online in the November ABA Journal.
