By Joel M. Sy Egco

The Public Attorney?s Office is backing up the Quezon City police pathologists who were accused of doctoring the autopsy report on three suspected car thieves killed on Edsa last month.

The Commission on Human Rights, through the private pathologist hired to re-autopsy the cadavers, questioned the forensics results discounting a rubout.

But the claim of Dr. Raquel Fortun was debunked at a press conference held in the PAO main office on East Avenue by PAO chief, Persida Rueda-Acosta and PAO forensics consultant, Erwin Erfe, MD, professor of forensics medicine at the Ateneo Law School, and member of the International Academy of Legal Medicine.

Fortun bucked the police conclusion that the encounter was a shootout.

She said the internal organs of the cadavers were all intact but the police autopsy indicated how much they weighed.

Fortun said the organs must be removed to determine their weight based on practice.

Erfe said Fortun was referring to ordinary autopsies made in hospitals to establish cause of death and extent of disease but in forensics autopsies?especially in gunshot wounds?internal organs are left as found to ascertain crucial circumstances such as bullet trajectories, which would be very difficult to find out were the organs detached.

He said seasoned forensics examiners keep the organs intact to preserve evidence for verification or correlation.

Erfe noted that organ weights were irrelevant in gunshot wounds where anyone would have a fairly good idea of the cause of death and that variations in organ weights cannot alter such cause.

?You do not throw away or mess up [with] evidence. You keep it intact,? he added.