Family of dead NYC teen loses court battle over brain

[Little Tich]

Source: Yahoo! News / Reuters

ALBANY, N.Y. (Reuters) - The family of a New York City teen who died in a car crash had no right to be notified that his brain was removed during an autopsy, New York state's top court ruled, overturning a $600,000 jury verdict awarded to his parents.

The Court of Appeals said on Wednesday that when the New York City medical examiner removed Jesse Shipley's brain for further inspection in 2005, it did not violate his family's right of sepulcher, an old legal provision that gives families the right to possession of a relative's remains.

"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 a violation of the right of sepulcher," Judge Eugene Pigott wrote for the court.

A spokesman for the City Law Department said his office was pleased with the decision.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/family-dead-nyc-teen-loses-court-battle-over-185748293.html

[HassleCat]

1. No longer needed it

If they need to look at a brain during an autopsy, do they have to put it back when they're done? I don't really see a need to do so.

[ColesCountyDem]

2. Brains are hard to examine in depth at autopsy.

Brains need to be 'fixed' in formaldehyde to more than a cursory examination. Brains are very gelatinous and hard to dissect, otherwise.

[joshcryer]

7. They put the brain in with the other major organs.

They don't have to put it back in the skull (and that would be difficult anyway).

There was a cryonics case (freezing dead bodies) where a man died and they diced up his brain and tossed it back in the gut region.

[erpowers]

3. Wrong Decision

This was the wrong decision. The family should have been notified that the brain of this young man had been taken out of his body. His family then should have been given the choice of whether or not to allow the city to keep the brain.

[happyslug]

4. Here is the actual opinion

https://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/Decisions/2015/Jun15/96opn15-Decision.pdf

[joshcryer]

6. Looks like page 15 explains the decision.

There is law against taking organs from people who have been buried but not by someone performing an autopsy. The dissent makes it clear that the law is about respecting the whole of the body.

Sometimes these very strict rule of law judgements can be a bastard.

[Tempest]

5. They should have used NY's religious exemption law as their argument n/t

[Gothmog]

8. I do not remember studying the right of sepulcher in law school

Interesting case

[happyslug]

10. Neither did I, but the same goes for Emancipation of Minors and Custody cases.

We did discuss artificial insemination, for that was a hot topic in the late 1980s, but that was about all when it came to family law except who gets what in inheritance law (We did discuss same sex marriage, but not restrictions on cousin marrying, the the later was NOT a hot topic, but same sex marriage was a hot topic even then). A lot of what I studied in law school fell into two broad categories, issues we would probably face in any legal practice AND whatever was the hot topic of the time period.

[Gothmog]

11. It appears to be a writ of habeus corpus for a dead person's body

[mainer]

9. The brain is almost always removed in a complete autopsy

Did the family also demand notification of every other normal procedure the pathologist did? Did they demand the return of microscopic slices of liver and lung and kidney?

Did the family object to the autopsy to begin with?