A Minnesota medical examiner who prosecutors say has a history of delivering false or misleading reports may have mishandled at least seven murder cases in which his testimony helped send people to prison, attorneys said Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. The announcement came after a review of cases, some dating back decades, handled by Dr. Michael McGee, a former Ramsey County medical examiner who prosecutors say performed autopsies from 1985 to 2019. McGee’s work was called “unreliable, misleading and inaccurate” by a federal judge, setting off a wide-ranging inquiry into a potential “chain of injustices,” prosecutors said. Now, a joint team of lawyers and medical experts will determine whether convictions and long sentences based on McGee’s work should be overturned or reduced. Their deep dive into McGee’s history began in fall 2021 after a federal judge threw out the death sentence of a man who was convicted in the high- profile kidnapping and murder of a North Dakota college student.
“Whenever a judge makes that determination it really calls into question ... everything the medical examiner has been involved with,” Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said. “Legitimacy and the integrity in of all of our convictions matter in how people trust what happens in the courtroom.” At the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office in St. Paul, a team of lawyers said McGee’s work may have resulted in wrongful convictions or inflated charges. Kristine Hamann of the Prosecutors’ Center for Excellence, a legal consulting group that helped conduct the review, said the cases were among the most serious in the county. Convictions secured in the cases rested on cause of death reports that may have been erroneous or misstated by McGee, Hamann said. The legal team will hire three independent medical examiners to reevaluate McGee’s work in the seven cases and determine whether there might be sufficient cause to recommend that convictions be overturned or sentences reduced. The attorneys whittled down a list of 215 cases linked to McGee. They began looking into McGee’s history after District Judge Ralph Erickson found flaws in McGee’s testimony in the murder trial of Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a man convicted in the 2003 killing of student Dru Sjodin.
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