New York court rules examiners can keep organs without notifying family
New York medical examiners can keep organs without notifying family members when bodies are released, a New York appeals court ruled on Wednesday. The decision divided the seven-member court 5-2, after a Staten Island forensic pathologist kept the brain of a 17-year-old car crash victim, only for it to be discovered by a classmate on a field trip. The appeals court justices all wanted the state legislature to decide the matter.
The right to claim a loved one's remains in order to bury them is known as "right of sepulcher". The right is considered part of common law, derived from unwritten elements in English law on which many American statutes are based. The family of Jesse Shipley brought suit after a forensic pathologist in Richmond County returned Shipley's body but not his brain, and instead "fixed" the brain in a jar of formaldehyde-derivative fluid.