Opinion ID: 1922462
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Statutes Protect Family Privacy

Text: People frequently die of natural causes or by accident in private and public places that are not health care facilities and when they are not being attended by a physician. Under those circumstances, the Medical Examiners Statute provides for a Medical Examiner to take charge of the body and determine the medical cause of death by performing an autopsy, if necessary. [24] The decedent's family or lawful representative cannot prevent those activities. That does not mean, however, that a person who dies by accident or natural causes becomes subject to having the details of his or her health condition exposed to the public simply because the statute directs a Medical Examiner to determine and certify the person's cause of death. In those circumstances, as we have explained, the Medical Examiner Statute and the Health Record Privacy Statute protect the families of those deceased persons by prohibiting the public disclosure of information. The Medical Examiner determined that Mr. Lawson's death was an accident. Therefore, public disclosure of the Autopsy Information is prohibited by the Medical Examiners Statute and the Health Record Privacy Statute. As Mr. Lawson's next of kin and lawful representative, Mrs. Lawson has standing to enforce the privacy protections of both statutes. Accordingly, it is not necessary for this Court to decide Mrs. Lawson's claim for injunctive relief grounded upon her alleged common law right of privacy. [25] We have concluded that Mrs. Lawson has a privacy interest that is protected by Delaware statutes. In recognizing the personal privacy protections provided for a decedent's family members by a federal statute, the United States Supreme Court noted: [t]he power of Sophocles' story in Antigone maintains its hold to this day because of the universal acceptance of the heroine's right to insist on respect for the body of her brother. [26] In providing the statutory protections that have been invoked by Mrs. Lawson, the General Assembly has recognized concepts that have been respected in almost all civilizations from time immemorial: [f]amily members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own. [27]