BILL NUMBER: S9443A

SPONSOR: SKOUFIS
 
TITLE OF BILL:

An act to amend the county law, in relation to coroner qualifications

 
PURPOSE:

To require that coroners must be health care professionals or board-cer-
tified medicolegal death investigators.

 
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:

Section 1: amends section 400 of the county law by adding a new subdivi-
sion 3-c requiring coroners to be doctors, registered nurses, nurse
practitioners, physicians' assistants or board-certified medicolegal
death investigators.

Section 2: amends County Law § 400(4-b) by specifying that coroner's
physicians must be licensed doctors.

              

Section 3: establishes the effective date.

 
JUSTIFICATION:

When a person in New York dies without a physician attending, or under
suspicious, unusual, or violent circumstances, including suicide, the
death is investigated either by an elected coroner or by a medical exam-
iner. Medical examiners are doctors, but coroners are lay people who
receive brief training by the state after they are elected.  Coroners,
who often hold other jobs, are paid, receive state benefits and are in
the state pension system. Many counties have difficulty recruiting
trained physicians to act as medical examiners, so opt to have coroners
instead. There are no professional qualifications to be a coroner and
individuals who become coroners need not have ever seen a dead body
before taking office. Many coroners are funeral directors.

Among other duties, coroners are responsible for determining the cause
of death and ordering autopsies when they feel they are needed. Since
most of them have no medical or specialized forensic training, it is
likely that they tend to underreport certain causes of death, including
suicide by drug overdose. During the COVID pandemic, coroners throughout
the country were slow to recognize COVID as a cause of death and may
have delayed reportage or contributed to undercounting of non-hospital
COVID deaths. Additionally, coroners work closely with police and sher-
iff's departments, or may even be members of those departments, and,
because of lack of professional training, may be unduly influenced by
those institutions when determining problematic causes of death in
murder and other criminal cases.

Because there is a shortage of qualified medical examiners in the state,
especially in non-urban areas, past attempts to require that physicians
serve in this role have not been successful. This bill would modernize
and professionalize coroners' officers by requiring that elected coron-
ers be physicians, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians'
assistants or board-certified medicolegal death investigators. Non-phy-
sician coroners would still be required to work with a licensed
coroner's physician, but would be in a much better position to make
independent, informed assessments of the causes of death, would be more
likely to recognize suicides, and would be better able to spot unusual
deaths, like deaths from new infectious disease agents, than a lay
coroner without health care training or specific training to become a
medicolegal death investigator.

 
PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:

New Bill.

 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:

None.

 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect one year after it shall have become a law.