California is the most populous State of the union, of which, it is one of only three States in which the person that is the coroner can also be the sheriff, which is the case in the vast majority of the counties in California. When it comes to the duties of the coroner, that job basically entails, when so necessary, determining the cause and manner of such death so as to create the required death certificate – along with taking custody of the body, making a positive identification of the deceased, as well as other attendant duties.
In short, the coroner position is a very important position, for not every death so occurring is absolutely going to be cut and dry; of which, thereby, it is important for the general public to be assured that all deaths are competently investigated and classified, correctly. So then, when we have those situations in which a given sheriff is also the coroner, this type of dual duty, though probably fine, for the vast majority of cases, will itself be susceptible to not being fine, in those cases, in which, the policing arm of the state, is itself, subject to some reasonable suspicion in regards to the nature of a particular death. That is to say, whenever the sheriff is also the coroner, that sheriff is probably going to desire to see that in those cases in which a person so dies within the custody of that sheriff or those that work for the sheriff, or when there is an interaction between the subject and the sheriff or one of the sheriff’s underlings leading to that subject’s death, then the sheriff, as coroner, may so determine or be tempted to determine the cause of death in a way and manner which does not ever impugn upon that sheriff’s prejudicial point of view.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand then that a sheriff should not also be a coroner, because the temptation of performing one’s job as a sheriff is probably going to be in a meaningful amount of cases, a situation in which the commonsense viewpoint for that sheriff, is to first protect and defend those that work with that sheriff, or the actual sheriff, himself, over having thereby instead a full and thorough investigation of a given suspicious death. So too, a sheriff is always going to be sorely tempted to desire to control the narrative in a way and manner in which law enforcement, gets the benefit of the doubt, over a search for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Basically, it must be said, in any situation, whether it be the sheriff as coroner, or a coroner that does not have the full and proper independent authority to conduct their affairs in an open and transparent manner, that the general public have been cheated from knowing the truth -- for whenever a coroner is not honest with that general public as to the nature of a given person’s death, so as to protect someone or for their own spurious reasons, then the person so dying has not been given their say; and those that are grieving for their loss, have not been provided with full disclosure on what so actually occurred.