Unusual Law Makes Coroners of Attorneys

Unusual law makes coroners of attorneys

BY NATE JENKINS / Lincoln Journal Star
Saturday, November 19, 2005

Deb Gilg wasn’t prepared for this.

She’d gone to law school, earned a degree, and honed her skills as a practicing attorney. The qualifications seemed sufficient for a job she was eyeing in the mid 1980’s – Keith County attorney.

Voters agreed, electing her in 1986.

Soon after, Gilg got wind of a job description that caused her to question whether she was indeed qualified for the position.

County coroner?

“It was very surprising,” said Gilg, who was Keith County attorney until 2002 and now juggles a private practice with her duties as deputy county attorney in Saunders County. “I felt I had a responsibility to the people I served to do it.”

Because of an unusual state law exercised only in Nebraska, Gilg became county coroner when she was elected county attorney – even though she had no training in the sensitive, scientific field of death investigations.

Gilg responded to her deficiency by earning certification as a forensic examiner, even though such training is not required under state law. At the time, she was believed to be the only county coroner in the state with certification as an examiner.

Nebraska’s reliance on elected county coroners instead of state medical examiners’ offices staffed with trained scientists puts it in the national minority. And the fact the state doesn’t require its coroners to have any forensics training after being elected makes it one of a tiny number of states that national experts describe as scientifically negligent.

Only four other states that have elected coroners – South Dakota, Colorado, Idaho and Indiana — do not require forensics training.

The lack of training shouldn’t be a concern, explained the executive director of the Nebraska Association of County Attorneys.

“When questions arise, I think most of them (county attorneys) are pretty good about sending them in for autopsies,” said DeMaris Johnson, the director.

“We’re talking about elected county officials here – they live in the community. They want to make sure things are done right.”

That mentality strikes Peter DeForest and other experts as naive. It is also at odds, said DeForest, with the public’s appreciation for the mental and scientific prowess necessary in death investigations. That perception, he said, has been cultivated by fictional narratives ranging from Sherlock Holmes to the popular television show CSI.

DeForest, a professor of criminalistics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, lectures on the need for government jurisdictions to have a uniform, scientific approach to death investigations that places scientists at the front end of investigations to both determine whether a crime was committed and then ensure important evidence is not contaminated.

“Having someone with a law background,” DeForest said of the Nebraska coroner system, “certainly isn’t the ideal thing.”

A primary duty of coroners in Nebraska is deciding whether the circumstances of deaths warrant autopsies. Was the death a suicide or homicide?

“It’s usually obvious,” said Lancaster County Attorney Gary Lacey, who has no medical training. “But there are some times when I worry whether a suicide is actually a homicide.”

In those cases, Lacey said, he orders autopsies to be safe. Requiring training for newly elected county attorneys/coroners, he said, “wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Lancaster County Public Defender Dennis Keefe said everybody in the system, including Gary Lacey, probably would prefer a professional medical examiner’s system. But that would raise costs, he said.

Still, he said, change is overdue.

“I think it’s an antiquated system that does not provide law enforcement or the public with the best information possible.”

Gauging the overall cost of Nebraska’s system is difficult because each county pays its own bills. Autopsies ordered by Lacey are done by Dr. Matthias Okoye. Earlier this year, the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners increased his contract for 2005 from $170,000 to $270,000.

In Oklahoma, a state with roughly twice the population of Nebraska and one with a state medical examiner system, the annual cost is about $5 million, according to that state’s chief medical investigator.

“That’s not much,” for a system that helps ensure death investigations are handled properly, said the investigator, Kevin Rowland. A primary attribute of the Oklahoma system, he said, is its independence from law enforcement and other arms of government that participate in the judicial process.

“That way there’s no conflict of interest,” he said.

Two central offices in the state – one in Tulsa, the other in Oklahoma City — decide whether to do autopsies based on input from licensed physicians that serve as county medical examiners. Fewer doctors have been willing to take on that low-paying, part-time job, so the state is changing course. It’s replacing county examiners with forensics-trained investigators responsible for multi-county regions. To keep costs down, the investigators will use their homes as offices, and Rowland predicts fewer autopsies may be ordered, cutting costs more.

Like untrained county attorneys in Nebraska, he said, physicians who act as medical examiners in Oklahoma are cautious because they lack expertise, leading to autopsies that might not be necessary.

The last time a Nebraska lawmaker proposed a state medical examiner’s system was in 1999, when Sen. Kermit Brashear of Omaha introduced legislation. He said he does not plan on introducing similar legislation again.

Many counties in rural reaches of Nebraska don’t have the luxury of a nearby forensic pathologist. In Keith County, for instance, Gilg recalls having to send bodies 130 miles northwest to Scottsbluff to have autopsies done. The practice is not uncommon. Many western Nebraska counties are forced to send bodies to either Scottsbluff or North Platte.

That can pose a “huge problem” in death investigations, said Gilg, because warm air causes bodies to decompose quicker. In essence, the primary piece of evidence in a homicide case, for example, can be severely compromised.

Because the county lacked vehicles that could keep bodies cold while in transport, officials improvised, Gilg said.

Bodies were sent to Scottsbluff packed in ice in the back of a hearse. Keeping them cold before they were packed was also a problem.

Also at risk for being compromised under Nebraska’s system and others that use elected county coroners, said a former supervisory scientist with the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C., is the integrity of investigations because science takes a backseat to elected officeholders.

“With the coroner system, it’s rooted in politics, and it’s hard to extract that,” said Max Houck, now director of the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University.

Elected officials helping oversee lean county budgets, for example, could be prone to considering cost when deciding whether expensive autopsies should be done.

Long transports of bodies such as the trip required from Keith County to Scottsbluff can add $400 to $500 to the cost of each autopsy, pushing the total amount to roughly $2,000. By comparison, Okoye’s contract stipulates that should he do more than 135 autopsies, each one after will cost $1,700.

Gilg said she never was involved in a case where an autopsy was not done even though the evidence warranted one.

Asked if cost was ever a factor in decisions about whether autopsies were conducted, she paused for several seconds before responding.

“It could be a factor,” she said.