Photo: Allison Dinner/AFP/Getty Images
When there’s no one to Attend to the Dead
How one small change to Texas’s Code of Criminal Procedure created a cascade of problems for the state’s capacity to investigate death
The Nation, 12 October 2023
“The systems that states use to respond to death vary across the United States, but Texas’s is especially unusual. Just 14 of Texas’s 254 counties have a medical examiner. In most of the state, elected officials called justices of the peace, who have no medical training, determine cause of death and sign death certificates. When justices choose to send bodies to other counties’ medical examiners for autopsies, the examiner keeps a substantial portion of the fee. There’s a high demand for limited services, and the profit motive can incentivize taking on more work than offices can handle.“
Completed with the support of a Neal Peirce Foundation Journalism Grant.
How one small change to Texas’s Code of Criminal Procedure created a cascade of problems for the state’s capacity to investigate death
The Nation, 12 October 2023
“The systems that states use to respond to death vary across the United States, but Texas’s is especially unusual. Just 14 of Texas’s 254 counties have a medical examiner. In most of the state, elected officials called justices of the peace, who have no medical training, determine cause of death and sign death certificates. When justices choose to send bodies to other counties’ medical examiners for autopsies, the examiner keeps a substantial portion of the fee. There’s a high demand for limited services, and the profit motive can incentivize taking on more work than offices can handle.“
Completed with the support of a Neal Peirce Foundation Journalism Grant.