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The Delaware Supreme Court this week ruled that when a natural or accidental death occurs, a family’s right to grieve in private outweighs the public’s right to know what caused the death.
The ruling marks the first time that the court has reviewed Delaware’s 2002 health record privacy statute, which ensures that health information gathered by the state will not be improperly disclosed.
In the past, when a death has occurred in a public place or in unusual circumstances, the Medical Examiner’s Office has reviewed each case individually and determined the appropriate information to disclose, often releasing the cause and manner of death, a spokesman for the office said.
As a result of this ruling, in Delaware, such information may no longer be made public when the family of the deceased person objects.
The court’s decision was immediately criticized by an attorney for the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, who said the Lawson family is entitled to grieve privately and to be left alone, but that does not mean the public is not entitled to know how Lawson died.
“This is about access to the way government handled this autopsy and information about the way this man died,” said newspaper attorney Alice Neff Lucan.
The case arose after the body of Duane Lawson, a 40-year-old Rehoboth Beach businessman, was discovered inside his car after firefighters put out a fire that engulfed the vehicle in the garage of the Henlopen Hotel.
Although the death occurred in a public place and in highly unusual circumstances, the cause and manner of Lawson’s death have not been released. This week’s ruling granted a permanent injunction preventing release of that information.
Wilmington attorney Jack Phillips, representing Lawson’s widow, Lisa Lawson, said the court’s ruling is clear.
“Autopsies that come to the conclusion that there has been an accidental death will not be made public over the objection of surviving family members,” he said.
Phillips said that a family’s privacy will now be protected even when a death occurs in a public place.
The state Legislature, he said, has solved the tension between the public’s right to know and a person’s right to privacy, delineating what is protected.
“Just because you drop dead on the Rehoboth Boardwalk and not in your recliner ought not to change what people are allowed to find out about you,” Phillips said.
The ruling appears to set broad limits on information from death investigations that will be made public.
Lucan said that the court erred.
“In this country, we’ve recognized the claim of the invasion of privacy for the last 110-plus years,” she said.
But in all that time, the right to privacy “has not included a right of privacy for the dead or for the family of the dead,” Lucan said. “The right to privacy concerns an individual and what happened to them,” she said. “It is not information about anyone else.”
“This court has stepped away from the common law definition of privacy,” Lucan said, “and I hope it is confined to Delaware.”
Shortly after Lawson’s death on Feb. 15, 2005, Rehoboth Beach Police Chief Keith Banks was ready to release the cause and manner of the death, but he was prevented from doing so when Lisa Lawson requested an injunction preventing release of the information.
That request was later denied in Chancery Court, but Vice Chancellor Steven Lamb’s ruling was reversed by this week’s unanimous decision of the state Supreme Court.
In a separate case, Delaware’s newspapers have appealed to Superior Court a ruling by the Attorney General that autopsy information is not public information under the state Freedom of Information Act.
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