Deaths While in Legal Custody and Incarceration in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province

The deaths while under police custody or prison may attract public interests or attentions that need to be handled carefully with scrutiny. Whenever such deaths occur in custody or during incarceration, controversial and legal issues or litigation may occur and a postmortem examination with meticulous investigation needs to be done. These deaths lie in a very complicated brew of ethical, legal and medical hurdles involving several authorities which can be hard to handle. In the past, some deaths became important public issues, 3) and some of these deaths have contributed to the total incidences of suicide. 5) Therefore, we conducted this study to examine these deaths so that we, forensic pathologists, may know how to handle sensitive issues regarding these types of deaths and we can make recommendations for policy to reduce more incidences of these deaths.