Jewish Law Responds to American Law 165
mination of life is a critical issue in Jewish law. One must concede that there is not total unanimity with regard to the moral stance of Jewish thinking with regard to this technologically induced critical ethical issue. Nonetheless, in the prevailing and more widely accepted Jewish view, the voluntary removal of medical life sustaining equipment would constitute the hastening of death. But what if the hastening of one person's inevitable death could save the life of other people?
VII
It would appear that there is no or little legal opposition in secular law to the authority of a coroner to order an autopsy.®> Where there is opposition te an action of a coroner, it is not to the performance of the autopsy. The conflict is based, as in Brotherton v. Cleveland** on the action of the coroner in removing a body part from the deceased in violation of the wishes of the deceased and/or the wishes of the family members.>*® Following the autopsy,“the coroner permitted Steven Brotherton’s corneas to be removed and used as anatomical gifts.” While one of the issues with which the court dealt was the constitutionality of the Ohio statute which allows a coroner to remove the corneas of an autopsy subject without consent,” there was no consideration of the right of the coroner to perform an autopsy. Per contra, where the circumstances are such as to warrant a coroner’s inquiry, as in the case of a child who dies under suspicious circumstances, there is an undisputed statutory duty to perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death.’:
The function of the medical examiner in deaths in which abuse may have played a part:[Clonsists of(1) determining the cause and manner of death to a reasonable degree of certainty; (2) providing expert evaluation of the presence, absence, nature, and significance of injuries and disease;(3) collecting ahd pieserving evidence;(4) correlating clinical and pathologic findings; and(5) presenting expert opinions in the proper forums.”
The autopsy is a critical component in determining the Se of death. A major function of the autopsy performed by the medical examiner is to differentiate between the mechanism of death and the manner of death. The mechanism is a lethal physiologic derangement through which the cause of death acts.” The man