Last month, the state Senate’s Health Committee approved a bill to ensure “accurate and unbiased” autopsies by requiring licensed physicians to conduct them.
The bill, jointly authored by State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson and Sacramento’s 6th district Senator Dr. Richard Pan, follows last year’s discovery of non-physician conducted autopsies at Ventura County’s Medical Examiner’s Office while the then-Medical Examiner Dr. Jon Smith was on vacation.
“This has brought understandable distress and anger to families, eroded the public’s trust, and opened a Pandora’s box of important questions about who and how we conduct postmortem exams,” said Jackson in a prepared statement. Autopsies, which not only form a critical component of gaining valuable medical knowledge, are crucial in the process of losing a loved one, argued Jackson.