by Audrey Dutton

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Since last year, ProPublica has been reporting on the troubled system for death investigations in Idaho, where a person’s cause of death is determined by elected coroners with no oversight or state support and, often, little training or education.

The failures documented by ProPublica left parents without answers in their baby’s sudden death and let clues vanish in the death of a woman whose family suspected foul play by her husband, a man later charged with killing his next wife.

The Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in January sent the state’s coroners a formal survey about their work, drawing responses from just over half. The office told coroners that it wouldn’t attach names to their responses when it made the survey results public, and some gave unvarnished critiques.

“The coroner system in Idaho is broken and a joke,” one wrote.

They also took the opportunity to plead for help, for changes they believe could transform Idaho into a place where death investigations consistently meet national standards.

Idaho coroners are elected to an office under county government control and funded by county budgets. Idaho politics have traditionally held the independence of local government as sacrosanct. This year’s state survey — and subsequent interviews by ProPublica — revealed a twist: Many coroners believe the state’s hands-off approach is outdated and harmful, making the quality of a person’s death investigation vary based on the county.

These local officials want the state to get involved, and they want it badly.

Jimmy Roberts of Bingham County, an agricultural area in eastern Idaho, is one such coroner. He worked with two interns in his office to draft a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system and described how states like Indiana and Arkansas addressed the same problems. In Indiana, as in Idaho, the county coroner is a constitutional elected office. But coroners in Indiana are subject to a suite of state laws that spell out what they must do.

The policies that Roberts highlighted from those states include creating a state training council for coroners, defining in law which cases must be autopsied, raising money for coroners through fees on death certificates or paying for toxicology costs through alcohol taxes, and giving coroners “first responder” status so they can access mental health care for themselves and get a supply of naloxone for reviving people who overdose.

Still, it’s unclear whether ideas like these will gain traction in Idaho after nearly 70 years of warnings and inaction on coroners.

Gov. Brad Little’s criminal justice commission has begun to take a look at the coroner system, via a subcommittee it created this year that includes coroners, the state police forensics lab director, a state legislator and others — but no county commissioners have joined yet, leaving the group without input from the people who control coroner budgets.

The subcommittee so far has drawn up a list of problems and brainstormed solutions — none of which it has endorsed — such as a state fund to help pay for autopsies, a forensic center in eastern Idaho to ramp up autopsy capacity or mandating autopsies in some child deaths.

Coroners are not united in how to make the system better and what it will take to get there.

Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, sent his 118-page report to fellow coroners and state legislators by email in October. But Roberts told ProPublica his offer to help the leaders of the Idaho State Association of County Coroners work on reform was “met with silence.”

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