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Bill to revamp Idaho coroner duties advances to state Senate • Idaho Capital Sun [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
A bill to clarify Idaho coroners’ roles in death investigations is headed to the Senate.
Senate Bill 1101 — developed with Idaho county coroners — is in response to a critical state government watchdog report that found inconsistencies in death investigations across Idaho, driven by sparse guidance in state law, bill co-sponsor Sen. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, previously told the Idaho Capital Sun.
The bill is cosponsored by all eight lawmakers who serve on the Legislature’s bipartisan Joint Legislative Oversight Committee. Wintrow and Rep. Douglas Pickett, R-Oakley, are co-chairs of the oversight committee.
“To their credit, the coroners have met and really tried to take a first step to get everybody on the same page of music,” Wintrow told the committee Monday. “Especially since we see inconsistencies about when an autopsy is ordered and so forth.”
Idaho State Association of County Coroners President Torey Danner, another bill co-sponsor, told the committee the bill attempts to fix many issues identified in the watchdog report.
“Throughout the state, you have counties that are not going out on scene, providing those investigations and doing the job the way that we’re trained — to that national standard,” Danner said.
The Idaho Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee advanced the bill to the Senate on a unanimous voice vote.
To become law, Idaho bills must pass the Senate and House, and avoid the governor’s veto.
The Idaho Sheriffs’ Association and the Idaho Association of Counties support the bill.
How Idaho bill would revamp death investigation standards
In Idaho, coroners are an elected, county-level position, as outlined in the state’s constitution.
The watchdog report, released in 2024 by the Office of Performance Evaluations, an independent state agency, found deaths in Idaho were half as likely to undergo autopsies than the national rate — and that Idaho had the lowest homicide autopsy rate in the nation.
In December, a ProPublica investigation found a decades-long pattern of failed attempts to reform Idaho’s coroner system.
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The bill that advanced Monday would partly repeal and expand the death conditions specified in Idaho law under which coroner investigations are required.
Under the bill, county coroners would also be required to investigate deaths that occur while people are incarcerated in jails or correctional facilities, or are wards of the state.
Clarifying the legal roles of coroners and law enforcement in death investigations was among several recommendations in the nearly 100-page watchdog report.
Under the bill, an Idaho coroner “shall be a medicolegal death investigator … charged with the responsibility of determining or certifying the cause and manner of death for those deaths properly the responsibility of the coroner.”
Law enforcement would be responsible for criminal investigations, the bill says.
Some Idaho coroners “rely on law enforcement to conduct death investigations on their behalf,” the watchdog report found, which is “contrary to established best practices that say there should be separate, though cooperative, death investigations conducted by law enforcement and coroners.”
Law enforcement and coroners have different focuses in death investigations, the report said: Seeing if there was a crime, and determining the cause and manner of deaths.
One parent says the bill doesn’t go far enough
Only one person testified on the bill at Monday’s committee hearing.
Testifying as a parent, Allen Hodges, who serves as president of the Idaho Trucking Association, told the committee the bill doesn’t go far enough.
He recounted how officials handled the death of his 16-year old daughter, who had epilepsy.
“After I did all the CPR (and) informed him of her epilepsy, the deputy coroner on the scene and the sergeant seized her medicine. They told me, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, but that deputy is going to escort you outside of your house, and this has turned into a crime scene,’” Hodges testified.
And, he told the committee, “they took nude photos of my daughter. I have no control over those photographs at all — because there’s no law in Idaho.”
The Office of Performance Evaluations report found information coroners gather in death investigations “is not considered confidential.”
Hodges asked the committee to not advance the bill.
Wintrow thanked Hodges for his testimony, and said the committee shouldn’t discount it. But she said she thinks the bill “is a good start,” and that future coroner legislation would likely come.
“As we know with legislation, it’s hard sometimes to get the whole ball of wax at one time,” Wintrow told the committee. “But to actually get the coroners to this point — where they have agreed together as an association that this is a start — I have no doubt that this organization will continue to work and that we’ll actually also do that.”
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