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From: Jasper
Date: 5/25/03
Time: 1:38:47 AM
Remote Name: 68.73.193.55
Charlie,
Analyzing stomach contents relative to the last time the deceased ate is only one of many variables involved in determining time of death.
In an interview with Geraldo Rivera, Michael Baden defended Golden’s decision to discard Nicole’s stomach continents because it was a judgment call that any pathologist might have made under the circumstances. Golden had her liver temperature and Goldman’s, which was a better indicator of when they died. However, there are so many variables associated with body temperature (see High Points) that it had no value in narrowing the time rage in question.
The duration of the attack is another matter. The prosecution waned a short time interval. The defense wanted a long one. To get a short time interval the prosecution’s pathologist (Golden’s boss, who hadn’t done an autopsy in years) expounded on the evidence that supported that conclusion and ignored the evidence that didn’t. Baden argued a longer struggle taking into account Ron Goldman’s neck wounds and the time it would have taken for blood to flow from his neck to form the blood flow pattern on his pants. The pattern could have developed only if he was on his feet for five or ten minutes.
Nicole’s blood splattered on the bottom of Ron’s left boot was one thing that indicated to the forensic pathologists on both sides that Ron was down when Nicole was killed. The absence of blood on her feet meant nothing because they were tucked under the fence outside of the killing cage. Her head injury indicated that she went down before Ron did. Complicating factors were the “defensive” cuts on Nicole’s hands, unexplained blood on the stairs relative to the poison of her body and uncollected blood drops on her back.
The inconsistent evidence muddied the waters enough to allow for the possibility that Ron may have died later than Nicole, although the preponderance of evidence weighed against it. The prosecution could have handled that bit of uncertainty with Golden. It couldn’t handle his conclusion that the stab wounds on both victims were caused by different knives. I don’t think that he was willing to budge on that. Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavaragiswaran’s long MEGO (my eyes glaze over) testimony sealed it for me.
Golden failed to compare the German Stiletto knife blade to the long wound through Goldman’s neck and he did not discover the severity of the blunt force trauma to the back of Nicole’s head. The prosecution used these omissions as an excuse to dismiss Golden as a competent pathologist. Badin argued in numerous interviews that there was nothing incompetent about Golden’s work – that some errors are inevitable, some evidence is subject to different interpretations and he got the big things right. I think the prosecution got rid of him because he was too much like our friend John Junot; too blunt and too inclined to call it the way he saw it no matter what anyone else wanted him to do. –Jasper