Article summary blog.

In detective novels and television crime dramas like "CSI," the nation's morgues are staffed by highly trained medical professionals equipped with the most sophisticated tools of 21st-century science. Operating at the nexus of medicine and criminal justice, these death detectives thoroughly investigate each and every suspicious fatality.
The reality, though, is far different. In a joint reporting effort, ProPublica, PBS "Frontline" and NPR spent a year looking at the nation's 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices and found a deeply dysfunctional system that quite literally buries its mistakes.
Blunders by doctors in America's morgues have put innocent people in prison cells, allowed the guilty to go free, and left some cases so muddled that prosecutors could do nothing.
In Mississippi, a physician’s errors in two autopsies [4] helped convict a pair of innocent men, sending them to prison for more than a decade.
The Massachusetts medical examiner's office has cremated a corpse before police could determine if the person had been murdered; misplaced bones; and lost track of at least five bodies.
Late last year, a doctor in a suburb of Detroit autopsied the body of a bank executive pulled from a lake -- and managed to miss the bullet hole in his neck and the bullet lodged in his jaw.
"I thought it was a superficial autopsy," said Dr. David Balash, a forensic science consultant and former Michigan state trooper hired by the Macomb County Sheriff's Department to evaluate the case. "You see a lot of these kinds of things, unfortunately."

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-real-csi-americas-patchwork-system-of-death-investigation

Who- highly trained people who examine dead bodies.

What- messing up autopsies and getting innocent people sent to prison and letting guilty people walk free.

When- present                                   

Where- all over the world

Why- not looking hard enough or well enough at the bodies and also, cremating bodies before the police could look at the body.

How- missing small things, or not paying attention.

Summary for a 3^rd grader.

Very well trained doctors, have made it harder for police officers to catch murders, or putting people away in jail that didn’t do anything. Also they ruined clues that the police needed to put the people in jail that actually are killing other people. By destroying or getting rid of the body’s. Before they could see if they really did the crime.