Family of car crash victim had no right to know brain was removed during autopsy, court rules
The family of a 17-year-old car crash victim had no right to be notified that his brain had been removed during an autopsy, New York’s highest court has held.
The 5-2 ruling (PDF), issued Wednesday by New York’s Court of Appeals, overturned a $600,000 jury award to the parents of Jesse Shipley, the New York Times, Reuters and Associated Press report.
The case turned on the meaning of the “right of sepulcher,” a common-law provision giving the family the right to immediate possession of a dead person’s body for preservation and burial.
“It is the act of depriving the next of kin of the body, and not the deprivation of organ or tissue samples within the body that constitutes the right of sepulcher,” Judge Eugene Pigott Jr. wrote for the majority.
But Judge Jenny Rivera, writing in dissent, said the medical examiner had a “ministerial duty” to return the whole body to the victim’s family.
“The medical examiner surely understood that failure to return the body in order to comply with the most intimate and personal of familial obligations would result in harm to plaintiffs,” she wrote.
Shipley’s parents sued the city in 2006 after learning that their son’s brain and other organs, which had been removed during the autopsy, had not been returned with his body. This was discovered when members of the teen’s high school class took a field trip to the morgue and spotted a brain in a jar, labeled with Shipley’s name, according to the AP. The family demanded that the morgue return his brain, and then held a second funeral.
A jury awarded them $1 million in damages, but the amount was later reduced to $600,000 by an appeals court.
A spokesman for the city Law Department said it was pleased by Wednesday’s decision. He also noted that because of the case, the city now notifies families when it retains a person’s organs.
But Marvin Ben-Aron, a lawyer for the Shipleys, said the family was “distraught” by the ruling. He also said he hoped it would prompt a change in the law.
“We in some way have to reconcile the law with our religious, ethical and moral values,” he said.
