The mechanism of injuring of front-seat passengers in head-on motor vehicle collisions: Forensic issues

Abstract

Forensic pathologists sometimes need to determine seating positions of automobile occupants after road traffic accidents as accurately as possible. That could be of essential significance particularly in regard to the question of guilt both in the criminal and civil law. So far, medical surveys have implied the specific injury which would undoubtedly point at the allocation of the seating positions of fatally injured car occupant. Some of the injuries could occur by both direct and indirect force action. Same type of injury of the specific body region in both drivers and front seat passengers could occur by different mechanism and in different phases of the accident. Sometimes neither the order of injury occurrence remains unclear, nor whether some of the injuries are post?mortal. What makes it even harder is the fact that same body regions, i.e. head and thorax, are most affected in both drivers and front seat passengers, and that these injuries are often fatal. Even if the victim survives the accident for some time and later dies in hospital, the possibility of accident reconstruction and determination of car occupants seating position at the moment of accident declines with the time length of survival period. Examining the victims? clothes, searching for biological traces, technical expert inspection of the vehicle, traffic expert analysis of the site, enables adequate reconstruction of the traffic accident. All this implies that in such cases the knowledge of underlying mechanism of car occupants? injury is insufficient, and that a close cooperation between forensic pathologists and the team of other forensic technical experts is necessary.