Forensic imaginaries: visualising the corpse in law

This article examines how forensic imaging technology transforms the way legal institutions visualise the corpse in the twenty-first century. Technological innovations in radiology have problematised the ‘subjectivity’ of the forensic gaze by embedding novel optical devices between the dead body, medico-legal expert, and judicial observer. These advancements have also made demands on coroners, judges and lawyers to acquire new skills in deciphering the meaning of pixelated shadows and interpreting digital images as evidence of death. Post-mortem CT comprises both a mechanical instrument and a computational technique that virtualises the corpse by disassembling it into an undefined set of slices and reassembling it into a three-dimensional model. In transmogrifying the materiality of organs, tissues and bones onto multi-planar reconstructions, the technology claims to produce an ‘objective’ image of the dead body, unmediated by the fallibility of human judgement. Yet through an assemblage of instruments, techniques, actors and expertise, post-mortem CT offers judicial observers the allure of seeing ‘corporeal evidence’ with their own eyes. The article argues that forensic imaging technology creates a new visual epistemology of the corpse. It enables judicial observers access to a visual regime that questions the subjectivity of the medico-legal expert, while also acknowledging the limits of law’s capacity to self-evidently know the corpse.