Evidence by Howard S. Becker

Author:Howard S. Becker [Becker, Howard S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-46640-8
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

The examiners’ classifications of specific cases reflect the differing processes of collection, differing interpretations of evidence, and differing responses to pressures from other interested parties found in specific cases within the same office as well as in comparison with other death examiners’ offices. (The situation resembles the one in which a baseball umpire’s decision that a given pitch was a “ball” or a “strike” settles possible disagreements among a similar array of interested parties.)

One kind of problem in assigning suicide as a cause of death occurs when families refuse to accept that conclusion, for a variety of understandable but legally irrelevant reasons. In such cases, the death investigators prevail: “Whatever phenomenon we classify as “suicide” reflects the criteria and work practices of the classifier. When relatives or epidemiologists disagree with the official medicolegal classification, discord may erupt, but they are at a disadvantage when it comes to directly influencing the outcome of the death investigation. . . . Relatives are usually unprepared for a death investigation and have little knowledge of the details that matter. They have few opportunities to offer their interpretation directly, and whatever they say is presumed to be biased and is screened by police officers, psychiatrists, or scene investigators” (Timmermans 2006, 109, my emphasis). Families, who have no continuing role in the medical examiner’s work life, can’t influence the conclusions an examiner reaches.

Timmermans adds a final thought: “Plausibility is the extent to which the proffered opinion [of the forensic pathologist testifying as medical examiner] is consistent with prevailing cultures of belief” (2006, 113).

These statements, and the extensive evidence Timmermans presents for them, mean that sociological explanations of suicide, designed to test the theories of Durkheim and researchers who work in his tradition, can’t rely on tabulations of causes of death released by the jurisdictions those determinations come from.

It seems likely that past researchers confronted with these messy and inconclusive data decided to acknowledge the existence of serious problems and then go on using those data as though they were “good enough” to support whatever conclusions the examiners thought reasonable.

But Timmermans’s work shows us another way of understanding, and using, the available data: not as a resource for solving scientific puzzles (see Kuhn’s discussion [(1962) 2012, 35–42] of scientific research as puzzle solving) but as an activity carried on by professionals who work in situations of cooperation and conflict that inevitably affect their judgments of what to call the things they work on: in this case, the allocation of a suspicious death to one of the four permitted categories. In other words, Timmermans treats the way the examiners work as a puzzle to be studied in its own right.

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