California: Home of the Sheriff-Coroner

Abstract

The great majority of counties in California have elected sheriff-coroners conducting medicolegal death investigations. State law enabling such a combination of official duties, favorable administrative structures, available staffing, funding and training issues have supported the intra-state spread of this death investigation system. Criticism of death investigation systems lead by officers whose primary duty is policing have centered on the perception of a conflict of interest in deaths investigated criminally by the sheriff-coroner and in deaths in the custody of the sheriff-coroner. Though such deaths are intermittently publicized and questioned in the media, no objective data has been collected and reported to support or refute such concerns.