Legislators in Indiana have unanimously advanced a bill that proposes an unusual solution to the shortage of qualified coroners to conduct death investigations: threatening them with jail time.
Indiana requires coroners and deputy coroners to complete a 40-hour training course within six months or one year, respectively. If they don’t, state law allows county officials to withhold their pay until they do.
House Bill 1031 would make it a Class B misdemeanor to continue to practice without completing the training. The bill was introduced in late 2025 and crossed over to the Senate in January. On February 24 it was passed 48-0, and returned to the House with amendments. The maximum penalties for Class B misdemeanors are six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
In some states, death investigations are handled by licensed medical examiners. In 11 states, including Indiana, all death investigations are conducted by county coroners. Coroners are typically elected rather than appointed—often after running unopposed—and not required to have any medical training. In 2024, an Indiana county elected a 19-year-old coroner who ran unopposed and continued his full-time job as a firefighter. In 2018, a different Indiana county elected a coroner who was still in high school.
Some states have a hybrid or otherwise less-conventional system, which can include having death investigations conducted by law enforcement. Wisconsin uses a mix of elected coroners and appointed medical examiners, but doesn’t require any kind of medical accreditation for either of them. In Washington some of the death investigations are conducted by local prosecutors; in Nebraska, all of them are.
According to Statehouse File, one lobbyist for the Indiana Coroners’ Association who testified in favor of the bill said that some coroners are volunteers, and so the threat of withholding their pay isn’t necessarily effective. It’s not immediately clear how threatening volunteers with jail time would be more effective.
Most of the 11 states that rely exclusively on county coroners have established some sort of penalties for failure to complete mandatory training requirements. But these are generally administrative penalties, such as getting kicked off the job, or the suspended-pay model that’s also used in Kentucky.
The only state that appears to leave the door open for criminal-legal penalties is Louisiana, where parish (county) coroners could be charged with malfeasance and potentially sentenced to a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of $5,000. But they aren’t likely to actually get prison time for not completing required training; the malfeasance charge is generally applied in instances of egregious misconduct, such as a 2025 case in which a coroner cremated a body without the family’s consent. Even in that case, while the fine was increased to $50,000 the defendant isn’t facing prison time.
Data current as of December 2023
Over the past decade or so, jurisdictions across the country have been struggling to keep up with death investigations, as the number of deaths go up and the number of forensic pathologists—the physicians who perform full autopsies—goes down. Increasingly, counties have opted to forgo expensive autopsies for overdose deaths because they can simply confirm cause of death via external examination and toxicology results. If someone had drugs in their system when they died, then that’s generally all the information an overworked and underqualified coroner with a backlog of cases needs to know.
But conversely, people who die of overdose are also some of the only ones to still get full autopsies, because states consider it worth the expense if it can be used as evidence to prosecute drug-induced homicide.
This is a large part of why more and more states are replacing the term “overdose” with “poisoning” in cases of fentanyl-involved deaths.
In Ohio, for example, a bill introduced in 2025 and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier in February would update the format of death certificates so that each has “a space to indicate whether the cause of death was due to fentanyl poisoning.” If an autopsy indicates opioid overdose as the cause of death, and the person had a certain quantity of fentanyl in their system at the time that they died, then the death certificate would be required to bear the term “fentanyl poisoning” or “fentanyl toxicity.”
All but two Ohio counties operate on the coroner system. Though the position is still an elected one, the state requires all county coroners to be licensed physicians in good standing. On February 10, South Carolina introduced a bill with the exact same language. South Carolina also uses the county coroner system, but only requires that coroners be over 21 with a high-school degree or equivalent.
In Illinois, which uses a hybrid model for death investigations, senators filed a bill in late January that would change the definition of “overdose” to specifically exclude deaths “in which fentanyl is determined to be the cause or a contributing factor,” requiring those deaths to be reported as “fentanyl poisoning.” The bill adds that the health department should still include data on fentanyl poisonings in its monthly reports on overdose.
Meanwhile, a Missouri bill referred to House Rules Committee on February 19 would require all drug-related deaths to be investigated “in the same manner as a homicide crime scene”—even if no charges have been filed.
Image via Office of the Lee County Coroner. Inset graphic via Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.