Mon 17 Jul 2006
A while back, I served on a Coroner’s Jury Duty. In this particular type of jury duty, it is left to the discretion of a jury as to the “manner” of a person’s death. Was it of natural causes, was it murder, suicide? etc. We weren’t tasked with determining who did the crime, or anything like that. We just determined the manner of the death.
Basically, for any death where it isn’t overwhelmingly obvious that the death was due to natural causes, a coroner’s jury is utilized in our county. Anyway, I did a complete writeup on the experience and it is available at:
http://www.omnux.com/kvandivo/jury/
I wanted to put an entry in the blog for it, because i’m going to link back to here so that people can leave comments on the jury duty if they wish to do so. If you aren’t familiar with coroner’s jury duty, I’d suggest taking a look at the above. It’s a lot different than regular jury duty.
I was with you right up the the final case. She’s in the bedroom, but there is blood in the bathroom and nobody says anything about moving her. Natural causes?
No, we didn’t really think natural causes.. But, we didn’t have any reason to think that it was foul play, so we had to go with accidental death. The term ‘natural causes’ actually has a specific meaning in coroner terms. If it had actually been ‘natural causes’ with no suspicious circumstances, the case wouldn’t have even been put before the coroner’s jury. But, because of the blood, etc., the coroner wanted to have the jury hear the case and make the determination.