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Dr. Nizam Peerwani is probably the highest-profile medical examiner in the United States. His territory covers four counties, but he's been called upon often to lend his expertise as far away as Afghanistan and Bosnia. Since he was hired here in1979, he's built what was a county morgue into a top-flight medical examiner's office equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories. County officials, co-workers, and peers sing his praises.

But at least one detail-oriented crusader thinks that Tarrant County's whole medical examiner's office may be built on a shaky legal foundation because of the way Peerwani's contract is written and the way he and his top staffers are paid. If David Fisher is right, and the contract is deemed illegal, that could open a can of worms that might have lots of convicted murderers calling for new trials. Some folks in Tarrant County are concerned - and with reason. Fisher claims responsibility for a recent shakeup that forced Lubbock County to completely reorganize its medical examiner's office. In Travis County, officials say that his efforts contributed to a reorganization of the M.E.'s office there.

There are other concerns about the complicated financial arrangements involving Peerwani, Tarrant County, other counties, and his private work - an arrangement apparently used by no other medical examiner's office in the state. Some local attorneys question Peerwani's willingness to go along with Fort Worth police on cases involving deaths by Taser. And there's some controversy about Peerwani's work for the federal women's prison hospital at Carswell. Judges, attorneys, former inmates, and families of inmates who died at Carswell or at local hospitals are outraged about the poor quality of the prison's medical care, which evidence suggests has led to many deaths. And yet, because Peerwani's private company holds the contract to do Carswell autopsies, families of inmates can't get copies of his findings on the deaths of their loved ones.

"I will answer all your questions," Peerwani told Fort Worth Weekly. "I have nothing to hide."

David Fisher, who's originally from Austin, is a pit bull when he gets his teeth into something. He spent most of the 1980s in the oil and gas business and most of that time suing a Colorado gas company for breach of contract on mineral leases he owned. "I had to learn the law because I represented myself," he said.

He won the suit, eventually, and since then, despite having no formal legal training, he's acted as a private consultant for individuals and lawyers - primarily in capital murder cases - who needed someone to read the fine print and figure out what it really meant. He's worked for the U.S. Postal Service enforcement branch in Houston, helping track down workers on disability who were committing insurance fraud. And he's consulted with a number of Texas government agencies that don't want to publicly acknowledge his work. That's because he has a tendency to stick his nose in other people's business. The Austin Chronicle once called him a glorified pest. He refers to himself simply as a butt-inski.

"Look, there are rules, there are regulations, and there are laws. And most people cannot navigate them," he said recently. "So that's where I come in, sometimes uninvited."

Fisher has been poking into Texas medical examiners' offices since 2001 because of what he found when he was asked by a newspaper reporter to look into the 1998 capital murder conviction of Rodney Reed.

Reed, who is black, was convicted of killing a white woman with whom he said he'd been having an affair. Looking through the case files, Fisher came to the conclusion that prosecutors hid evidence that could have exonerated Reed. His work didn't directly affect Reed, who is still on death row and still fighting his conviction with the help of the Innocence Project. But in poring over autopsy records in the case, Fisher said, he also came to believe that the prosecutors had pushed the M.E. to falsify his report. "And if a state prosecutor could have a medical examiner edit and falsify his report, what wouldn't they [medical examiners] do?" he asked himself.

Fisher's work in Travis County contributed to a reorganization of that medical examiner's office, said Danny Hobby, who, as executive director of emergency services for Travis County, also oversees the M.E.'s office. "I can't credit Fisher with any given point of the reorganization, but just having his input, hearing his ideas - some of which I agree with, some of which I don't - has been very helpful to us. He's smart and extremely enthusiastic in getting the medical examiner offices around Texas to function as they really should."

In 2008, Fisher started hounding Lubbock County officials about their M.E.'s office, which was being operated via a contract with the medical school at Texas Tech University, something Fisher insisted was illegal. Officials never admitted he was right, but eventually  the county dropped its contract with the medical school and appointed a separate medical examiner.

Even some of his detractors - a county official and a defense attorney in Lubbock County, for instance, neither of whom wanted to be named in this story - say that while Fisher tends to see conspiracy everywhere, he is still right on a lot of points.

"Out here in Lubbock," said the defense attorney, "we had a medical examiner who was from out of state who was working here on an institutional license from the medical school. And Fisher kept browbeating everyone that since the doctor didn't have a Texas medical license he was illegally operating as the M.E. He was talking about how all these capital murder cases should be granted relief because of that license. Still, for all his being a pain in the neck, he was right. He is one smart man. And he is right about going after the M.E.s in Texas. Somebody needs to watchdog these guys, and I'm actually glad he's doing it."

Told that Fisher was raising questions about Peerwani, the lawyer laughed. "He's going after the guy with the most impeccable reputation in the state, maybe the country? Well, that's Fisher for you."

What Fisher is gnawing on right now are two key points in Tarrant County's contract with Peerwani.

The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure defines how large counties must hire and pay their medical examiners. It establishes that the commissioner's court appoints the M.E., who serves "at the pleasure of the commissioner's court," and that the court "shall ... pay the salaries and compensations of the medical examiner and his staff."

But in Tarrant County, Fisher maintains, the contract is not with Peerwani as an individual, but with what is called Peerwani's professional association - technically a partnership, formed in 1981. While hospitals can legally hire professional associations, Fisher said, "the medical examiner is a county official. And a professional association cannot be a county official."

A copy of the contract provided to the Weekly by Tarrant County Administrator G.K. Maenius shows that the entity with which the contract is made is "Nizam Peerwani, M.D., P.A." The P.A. stands for Professional Association, and Fisher asserts that legally, the "P.A." means that the agreement is with Peerwani's professional association.