Rigor Mortis: A Reliable Tool for Estimating Time Since Death in Indian Scenario

The objectives of a medicolegal autopsy must be fulfilled to an extent wherever possible after postmortem examination by forensic pathologist. One of these objectives is to estimate time after death the body is being examined. It is a challenging task to estimate time since death once putrefaction sets into a dead body due to external and internal factors that comes into play. The early postmortem changes though relatively less effected by external and internal factors are therefore considered to estimate time since death. Rigor mortis is one of the early postmortem changes. In this research article, the authors tried to determine the reliability of this tool to estimate time since death in tropical country like India.