Literature reviewPost-mortem examination and PMIThe purpose of post-mortem examination of human remains plays a crucial role in criminal investigations. The role of the autopsy is to establish three relevant facts: the causes of death, the identification of the deceased and the time at which death occurred (Jackson and Jackson, 2011). The reason that collecting time of death is so important is that it can be used against statements or alibis that can be constructed during a criminal investigation (Adcock and Chancellor, 2013). If the autopsy takes place within the first 72 hours, the pathologist will normally be able to give a relatively accurate time of death, based on the drop in body temperature and the condition of the body itself, but in outside this period. area; there is less medical information to correlate the postmortem interval, called PMI (Gennard, 2007). The PMI is harder to correlate after that 72 time zone for one reason, and that is temperature. Once death has occurred, the human body's temperature begins to drop approximately 37°C below that of the environment, allowing the pathologist to turn back the clock. According to the PMI (Jackson and Jackson, 2011), the problems with this PMI correlation method present themselves in two different ways. The first of these concerns factors that can affect the rate at which a corpse cools, such as temperature, humidity, precipitation, and exposure of the corpse to the environment (Jackson and Jackson, 2011), and the second being that after 42 hours decomposition is normally established, which would normally increase body temperature slightly (Jackson and Jackson, 2011).PMI, Entomology and the Five St...... middle of paper. .....e present in the corpse due to a direct relationship with the stage of decomposition; this must be taken into account when determining the PMI. Payne et al (Gennard, 2007) conducted an experiment using pig heads buried at depths of 50 to 100 cm and listed 48 species of arthropods colonizing the corpse, with 20 being restricted to buried corpses. Between 6 and 8 weeks after burial, they recorded an 80% decomposition rate based on weight loss, which was compared to the same stage of decomposition of an unburied pig, which reached the same decomposition stage in 7 days. The effects this has on determining PMI can be seen in two ways, one through the different insect successions that can be used to identify possible PMI, and the second in how burial can reduce considerably the time required for the decomposition of a corpse. which perhaps makes it more difficult to calculate an accurate PMI.