Medical expert avaliation in personal injuries caused by motor vehicles: inadequacies and its consequences

Abstract

The DPVAT Insurance is a compulsory insurance that aims to cover expenses generated from financial to physical and/or psychological claims arising from the transit of vehicles, being the person affected the driver, or even

driven out of context, but directly related to these accidents. It is therefore an action that involves the civil sphere of the Brazilian law, no type of connection to the criminal sphere. It is obvious that it involves evaluation and assessment of damage to physical integrity and / or health, in order to repair them integrally. Thus, its quantification is dedicated to the percentage of body area(s) involved and the importance of this in the general context of the life affected. Even more, it should be taken into account factors beyond the explicit condition, job profile graph, for example. However, in (for) the criminal sphere, the quantum of damage is well established by Article 129 of our Brazilian Penal Code and harm to physical integrity and/or health of others - and not for himself, since it does not care about self-injury -, dosed them as mild, severe, serious and followed by death, no matter the job profile graph in a specific way, but just so generic, so as to favor the unmasking of the intentionality of a tort. Given this, we find a clear difference on performance between the two expert conditions. More specifically, if a sphere - the civil law – cares about assessments and percentage of each case and to the full repair of the damage, the other - criminal - is bound to focus measurements for investigations leading to the discovery related to intentionality and are able to allow the punishment of an individual offender. Legal medicine specialists does not act the same way that medical experts of the civil sphere and are not prepared for this. They are more concerned about providing justice to the concrete material evidence that may elucidate crimes against life (murder, attempted murder, bodily injury, miscarriage, crimes against sexual freedom etc.), while the others try to show that damage in receiving care insurance, etc benefits. Therefore, in this work we demonstrate the inconsistency of mandatory assessment of injury and/or the health of victims from expert consultations carried out under the legal medicine institutes (IML) and legal medicine specialist, escaping, therefore, the responsibility of these two and being able to generate interpretations of harm caused.