Senators passed legislation meant to help the state Medical Examiner deal with a backlog of bodies.
Members of the Senate voted unanimously, 34-0, in favor of the legislation. The House of Delegates had already passed the bill, so that completes the legislative process.
The issue was highlighted last fall in a legislative audit that described a legal no-man’s land for bodies that have not been claimed.
The Medical Examiner’s Office has been keeping 247 remains of people who died under circumstances that required investigation. The bodies may be cremated if they are deemed to not be aspects of evidence in a criminal case. But they are placed in a freezer if they might still be part of the criminal evidence record.
Those are being kept because they haven’t been identified or because they have not been claimed by family.
State code does not authorize the Medical Examiner to dispose of them. Separate state rules, the legislative auditors concluded, describe disposal methods that state code does not authorize.
So the number of bodies in storage just keeps going up.
The Legislative Auditor recommended that state code be amended to allow the Department of Health and Human Resources to establish ways to dispose of the remains. Lawmakers considering the audit agreed to pursue the issue during this regular session.
The bill authorizes the Medical Examiner’s Office to move forward with a range of rules to deal with the situation, including cremation or placement in a cemetery.
And the bill would authorize the Chief Medical Officer to return remains to next of kin, opening the possibility of exhumation from the cemetery.
“Unidentified remains are to be buried after six months and all efforts to identify the remains have been unsuccessful,” said Senate Government Organization Chairman Mark Maynard, R-Wayne.
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