Hearse Chasing As Misuse of Office

Everyone knows about ambulance-chasing lawyers, but until reading an article in today's Citizens' Voice of Luzerne County (PA), I had never heard of hearse-chasing deputy coroners. Maybe I would have known about them if I'd watched the TV show Six Feet Under.

According to the article, funeral home directors in Luzerne County have claimed that some deputy coroners have used their position to get funeral business. Deputy coroners pronounce individuals dead, informally investigate the circumstances of death, and direct where bodies are to be moved. Apparently, some deputy coroners in the funeral business were using their county position to get decedents' families as clients. There's even a Coroner Corruption Blogspot.

A proposed Luzerne County ethics code (see p. 16) would prohibit a member of the county coroner's office, while on county business, from soliciting funeral business or recommending funeral services. If he already had a relationship with the family, he could keep the family as a client. Otherwise, no dice.

This is about as focused an ethics provision as I've ever seen. A regular misuse of office provision would appear to cover this situation. It's the recommendation of business, the indirect conflict, that really requires (and in the Luzerne County code gets) special language, to make it clear that this benefit to others, which often includes kickbacks, is prohibited.

Macabre as this situation may seem, it is pretty much the same issue as with first responders who have relationships with towing companies, and use their positions to send them business, a situation I discussed in a blog post earlier this year. There, the issue was kickbacks, here it is direct business. But the misuse of a local government position for one's own benefit is much the same.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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