Timothy Marsh

I suppose the thing that would be more surprising to listeners is there's more that brings us together than drives us apart in this sense.

And I think one of the things that both Joe and I are very animated about is trying to dispel the myths around the nature of what we do.

CSI has obviously done a lot to create an entire mythology around forensic pathology, and you needn't look very far to find...

umpteen examples of the law being portrayed in ways that are probably pretty inaccurate.

I mean, fortunately, that's not the case.

And I think that's not the case for a couple of reasons.

One of them is that the quality and the independence of forensic pathologists in Victoria is unparalleled.

So you're not going to be cross-examining to discredit somebody.

So at no stage are you going to be suggesting that this person doesn't know what they're doing, that they're incompetent, that they're biased, that they're in the pocket of

the party who's commissioned them.

So I think probably the first thing to point out is that forensic pathologists are there to assist the court.

They don't appear on behalf of either party.

Well, the first thing I'll say is certainly in most murders, you'll have an opportunity to cross-examine key witnesses at a preliminary hearing.

And it's very common.

I won't say it's universal, but it's very, very common to have forensic pathologists as being one of the witnesses who you would want to cross-examine at that early stage, precisely because their evidence is so pivotal in establishing things like causation evidence,

intent so that's often where i will get a chance to lay the groundwork and typically

Most of my preparation, most of the heavy lifting is going to be done in the lead up to that preliminary cross-examination because ideally I want to know everything that the forensic pathologist is going to say that's going to be useful to my case at that early stage.

In terms of the trial itself, yeah, generally speaking, a forensic pathologist would be one of the earlier witnesses.

And that's a matter for the prosecution in terms of how they want to structure their case.

But it's usually quite natural to begin with the crime scene itself and to sort of work your way out towards witnesses that impact directly on the death.