Tennesseans claim flawed medical examiner led to wrongful convictions

• Charles Harlan was suspended without pay as an assistant Davidson County medical examiner in 1994.
• One man caught in his wake is Wayne Burgess, convicted of killing his girlfriend’s young child years after Harlan’s errors began to be uncovered.

Charles Harlan confirmed a patient’s death to her family by fax: “She is green and has maggots crawling on her.”

He once misidentified the bodies of two inmates killed in a car crash and sent their remains, still shackled, to the wrong families.

Once, a Tennessee man was pulled over, alive, two years after Harlan incorrectly identified a burned corpse and declared him dead.