The bungling may be enough to acquit Timothy McVeigh, the chief suspect in the Oklahoma City case (whose trial opened on April 24th), regardless of other evidence against him.That FBI forensics experts have slipped up so badly in high-profile cases is alarming: what must the work be like in other, less scrutinised cases?
For the remaining unmatched cases, information on follow-up was collected by visiting the various hospitals to scrutinise case records, and by making enquiries of treating physicians and general practitioners.
From the outset relations between the police and the CPS were cool, and the need for the lawyers to scrutinise cases before deciding on a charge inevitably led to a proliferation of paperwork.
It was therefore deemed necessary to scrutinise cases diagnosed with for example seborrhoea, alopecia and immune-related skin diseases.
The incidence of diabetes at first admission, and the emergence of cases within 3, 5 and 6 years of first admission, was determined by scrutinising the case notes in the first instance.
A panel composed of experienced officials will be appointed for all in-depth investigations, with the remit of scrutinising the case team's conclusions with a "fresh pair of eyes" at key points of the inquiry.
In addition, I will be asking the force to bring a report to my public board meeting so that my board and I can scrutinise the case in detail and hold the police to account.
Although the study is not as numerically large as some others, its major strength is that all admissions were captured and each case scrutinised by a nephrologist making it unlikely that any cases were missed, as can occur when relying only on electronic records as other larger studies have done [ 8, 20, 32].
There is, though, another view that is shared by many who have scrutinised the Lockerbie case.
We scrutinised these 93 case report forms for all adverse events occurring during the acute, taper, and follow-up phases, and compared our totals for adverse events with the totals reported in appendix D of the CSR.
