Abstract
The office of coroners and medical examiners ; standards of proof required for suicide verdicts; some bizarre rulings on suicide ; who is appointed to coronial positions ; the matter of under-reporting of suicide ; Australian research findings on suicide determinations.
Coroner : an official whose duty is to enquire, on behalf of the king, how any violent death was occasioned, for which purpose a jury of twelve persons is impanelled.
—Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755
There are a few who envy me. They want to know what they have to do to get my job, to be who I am. ‘It’s only death, how hard can it be?’ Here, I silently reply, take it all. Every festering remnant of the people no one cared about in life, much less in death; all the broken children who will never know that I had grieved for them. Take it all. Just leave me my car keys so I can go home permanently. Someone else can listen to the bullshit Death loves to spew. He never shuts up.
—Joseph Scott Morgan [A former medical examiner in Louisiana and Georgia, USA]
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Notes
- 1.
Law Commission Report 62 Coroners (2000: xi).
- 2.
The only jurisdiction that declined participation in the study.
References
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Tatz, C., Tatz, S. (2019). The Coroners. In: The Sealed Box of Suicide. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28159-5_11
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