The highest court in NYS rules that a pathologist doesn’t have to tell you what they do to bodies during autopsy.
The tragic and unfortunate events from which this litigation originated occurred on January 9, 2005, when the decedent Jesse Shipley, a 17-year-old high school student, was killed in an automobile accident in Staten Island, New York. Dr. Stephen de Roux, a forensic pathologist and a medical examiner employed by the Office of the New York City Medical Examiner, conducted an autopsy of decedent the day following the accident at the Richmond County Mortuary.
The medical examiner spoke with decedent’s father, plaintiff Andre Shipley, prior to conducting the autopsy. He apprised Mr. Shipley of his intentions and, even though it was not required, obtained Mr. Shipley’s consent to perform the autopsy. Mr. Shipley asked the medical examiner to make decedent’s body as “presentable as possible” for the funeral. During the autopsy, the medical examiner removed, among other organs, decedent’s brain and “fixed” it in formalin [FN1] in a jar separate from tissue samples he had taken of other organs [FN2]. The jar was labeled with decedent’s name and the date of the autopsy, and was placed in a cabinet in the autopsy room. The medical examiner’s routine practice was to wait until the cabinet had accumulated at least six specimens before contacting a neuropathologist, Dr. Hernando Mena, who would at that point travel to Staten Island in order to conduct a neuropathologic examination of the brain [*3]specimens.
Once decedent’s autopsy had been conducted, funeral home personnel retrieved decedent’s body from the mortuary and a funeral was held on January 13, 2005.
In March 2005, forensic science students from decedent’s high school took a field trip to the Richmond County Mortuary. During a tour of the autopsy room, some of the students observed the specimen jar holding decedent’s brain. This information was relayed to decedent’s sister, Shannon, who told her parents.
The parents sued and won. The state appealed.
The money they were awarded in a lower court was overturned.
HT/ Twitter: @JasonChisel
What the fuck!?
I thought bodies were properties of the families?
If you want to use the body/part as a side show or for experiments, let a bitch know, and get permission, okay? Plenty of people want the attention even after death, they didn’t need to do this.
Jerks.
My kids have instructions to bury me in a pine box, no autopsy, no funeral home. Just put me in the box and put the box in the ground. Don’t try to regulate my ass after I’m dead.
Is that endangered pine? lol
Don’t go. We’ll miss you. 😀
No, I think I’m gonna make it myself – out of pallets. With maybe some tuck & roll like I had in my 65 Chevy.
I’ll miss you too, but I think I still have a while left to torment progs here. 🙂
She prob’ly won’t get me a casket.
She prob’ly won’t give it a thought.
She’ll stack my old bones in the carton
Of the color TV she just bought.
So don’t bury me out on the prairie.
Don’t bury me under the waves.
Just bury me underneath Wal-Mart
So my wife will come visit my grave.
-Pat Dailey
Like Leonard said: “I don’t care if you shove a bone up my ass and let the dogs carry me down through the woods …”
Not to be a buzzkill or anything, but
in most places you can’t even MOVE a dead body until the M.E. has been called and made his ruling. Then there’s rules about how the body has to be transported and disposed of, usually
by a licensed undertaker or mortician.
You can thank the funeral industry for to the passage of most of those laws,
of course.
Now the above comments are assuming you literally wanted your kids to do the burial, which you may not have meant. However, depending on the circumstances surrounding your death, an autopsy may be REQUIRED to eliminate the possibility of foul play.
So – if you don’t want your kids to be lawbreakers, you may have to have
your dead ass regulated anyway.
But I promise: at that point, you
won’t care at all.
: )
The right of sepulcher? Never heard of it but a Million bucks because he was buried without his brain?? How is that going to make it better?
The thought of burial is creepy to me-I want to be cremated and then have some of the ashes put into a crucible to have someone roll out some sheets, preferably an orange mix, and use it in a leaded glass window.
I’ve advertised in pet magazines to take a pets’ ashes, add them to a batch and use them in a glass piece-have had a few customersH
I think the whole funeral thing is macabre.
Maybe it’s just me, but to think that any “body parts” being missing is an issue doesn’t make sense.
The person that existed no longer needs those things.
They have moved on.
Yet they have laws for desecration of a corpse. Go figure. lol
I figured somebody would likely bring that up.
I have already checked the local laws and know that a death certificate is required, as is burial in a registered cemetery. But you can apply for a family cemetery plot on your own property in Arkansas.
You are allowed by federal law to make your own casket, though you can be buried without one if it’s ok with the cemetery.
Embalming in my state is not required if the body is buried within 24 hours. And autopsies are only required if a person dies in suspicious circumstances or there is a crime involved. The coroner makes the call on that, and one of my kids is a cop who knows the coroner, so that helps.
Chances are, when I get too old and fucked up to use a keyboard and mouse, I’ll probably just walk out into the wilderness and die there. Or, if I can’t walk, tie my dog’s leash to the wheel chair and tell him to go get the squirrel…
Can I weigh in here, as an actual Pathologist?
Removal of the brain and other organs is standard for a full autopsy. Generally, unless there is some compelling reason to keep them (either for diagnostic purposes, or medicolegal ones) only a small sample of the organs is retained for microscopic analysis.
(And no, everything is *NOT* put back in it’s original location. After examination and sectioning, the viscera are placed into a red biohazard bag, which is then placed into the now empty body cavity, and the body sew shut. The funeral home will make the body presentable for viewing; that’s not my job.)
Anyway, on to the brain. Brains are not at all like you’ve seen in the movies or tv. They have very little solidity to them – think firm jello. This makes them difficult to work with, especially if death occurred several days previously. Let’s just say they start to melt, quickly. The upshot of all this is that quite frequently, the brain is placed into formalin, INTACT, and the body is released to the funeral home without it. A brain requires at least one week of soaking in formalin to properly fix the tissues.
After complete fixation, the brain is much more solid, and can be more easily sliced/sectioned for analysis.
We have, at any given time, at least a half dozen brains in formalin in our morgue. All the time. Right now. This is not even close to being an uncommon practice. This is not an “experiment” or a “side-show”. Its forensic pathology. Whatever judge it was that originally awarded this family a lawsuit award should lose his job; he’s clearly an imbecile…or a liberal, but I repeat myself.
Now, the mistake this facility made was in having the decedent’s identifying information on plain view on the container. It should have simply had a case number, patient number, social security number, or whatever system they use to track cases – but not the decedent’s actual name.
The patient’s body is most certainly not the property of the family. Especially not in a case where the local coroner or medical examiner has claimed jurisdiction.
I am having my ashes sent to the IRS with a note. “Now you have it all, you greedy bastards”.
All I can say is, you’re lucky to live in Arkansas.
P.S. – Hope you get your wishes carried out. If you do,
leave a comment here at IOTWR and let us know.
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