I’m a forensic pathologist trained by Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, New York City’s chief medical examiner for 25 year including on 9/11. For 30 years, I’ve investigated deaths as a medical examiner and coroner. I’ve done thousands of autopsies and testified in hundreds of hearings, depositions and trials. I’m confident that most of my opinions were correct, but I know I’ve sometimes been wrong—not because of malice or intentional misrepresentation but as a consequence of human frailty, scientific inadequacy and contextual biases that are impossible for anyone to completely eliminate. I’m not a hero of the kind portrayed in crime shows and mystery novels. I’m not a villain, either. I’m an imperfect, human practitioner of an inexact science. Unreasonable Certainty exposes my fallibility as a medical expert—my professional dark places

I’m a 1981 graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine and a diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners. The American Board of Pathology has certified my competence in anatomic, clinical and forensic pathology. For 30 years, I performed autopsies as a medical examiner and coroner in Illinois, New York, Florida and Colorado. I had the authority to investigate and determine the cause and manner of death whenever someone died of known or suspected violence, whether accident, suicide or homicide. I had jurisdiction over deaths in custody, deaths on the job, deaths by poisoning, deaths under suspicious circumstances and deaths that were sudden and unexpected or unattended by a medical practitioner.

Unreasonable Certainty's focus is forensic medicine’s limitations. I emphasize what I don’t know, the questions I can’t answer and the things I once knew that turned out to be wrong. Death investigation is a search for the truth about how people die, when they die and the manner in which they die. An understanding of the uncertainties inherent in forensic medicine is critical both to the search itself and to public perceptions of the validity and fairness of the process.

“An addictively written, thorough coroner’s chronicle.”
– Kirkus Reviews