BILL NUMBER: S5712

SPONSOR: SKOUFIS
 
TITLE OF BILL:

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

 
PURPOSE:

To require that coroners must be healthcare 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: Sets 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 laypeople who
receive brief training from 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 they 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, they
likely tend to underreport certain causes of death, including suicide by
drug overdose. During the COVID pandemic, coroners throughout the coun-
try were slow to recognize COVID as a cause of death. They may have
delayed reportage or contributed to undercounting of non-hospital
COVID-19 deaths. Additionally, coroners work closely with police and
sheriff's departments or may even be members of those departments, and,
because of a 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, physician
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 inde-
pendent, 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.

 
LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:

Senate

2023: N/A

2024: S9443A, Amend and Recommit to Local Government Assembly

2023: N/A

2024: A8420A, Reported Referred to Rules

 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:

None.

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