(Virtual autopsy image courtesy of the Center of Forensic
Imaging at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of
Bern, Switzerland.)  A three-year-old Israeli girl was strangled
to death by her father earlier this year, and the nation was
shocked—by the luridness of the crime, by the father’s
subsequent suicide attempts, by the divorce-gone-bad story it
emerged was behind the crime, and, not least, by the fuel the
child’s mother poured on an ongoing battle between ultra-
Orthodox circles and the country’s law enforcement agencies over
the permissibility of autopsies when she initially refused to
allow one on her daughter’s body.  The objection grew from the
Talmud’s interpretation of the biblical imperative for a speedy
burial, first spelled out in Deuteronomy, where it states that a
hanged man “shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou
shalt surely bury him the same day.” Not only must he be buried
within 24 hours of death, according to the tractate Sanhedrin,
but there can be no “disfigurement