Genealogists have long used coroners’ records to fill out our family histories. These records are what we call “public records,” making them available to researchers as well as the media, and anyone else for that matter. Since most of the records we’re looking for are old, I’d never considered the issue that recently came up in Pennsylvania. Following is an excerpt from an article in the May 21, 2012 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments this month in Harrisburg in the appeal of a media company that was prohibited from immediately looking at a coroner’s autopsy report to find out the manner in which a Pennsylvania college student died.
At issue was whether there is a conflict between the Right-to-Know Law and the Pennsylvania Coroner’s Act, which says manner-of-death records only become public 30 days after the end of the year in which the person died.
According to the high court’s grant of allocatur, it will look at whether the Commonwealth Court used a new, more lenient standard of “inconsistency” when determining if statutory provisions conflict, rather than the stricter “irreconcilable” standard required by the Statutory Construction Act.
All parties in the case agreed the records were public — it was just a matter of when they are required to be disclosed.
