Published: September 02, 2009 11:52 pm      

Dignity in death

The Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office is on life support, and it’s time the state Legislature got serious about how to resolve the long-term problems plaguing this important state agency.

As Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee has rightly pointed out, Oklahoma’s families deserve quick resolution when dealing with a loved one’s death under suspicious or traumatic circumstances. That is currently not the case for Oklahoma families who must wait sometimes up to nine months for an autopsy report to be issued by the state ME’s office.

What’s worse is the state Medical Examiner has stated that due to inadequate funding, staffing and antiquated equipment, this state office is no longer capable of handling all of the autopsies the office is mandated by state law to perform. This is an unacceptable tragedy.

Highlighting the issue again this week was the power outage that impacted the Oklahoma City building where the office’s morgue is kept. Emergency generators were required to help prevent any damage to the corpses and specimens that must remain refrigerated. The outage also caused lost work time as nonessential personnel were sent home Monday.

The office’s facility is so woefully outdated that even a retrofit of the building would be a dubious expenditure.

University of Central Oklahoma President W. Roger Webb and his staff have offered a solution. Their proposal, supported by the City of Edmond and the majority of Edmond’s legislative delegation, is to move the ME’s office to a new facility on UCO’s campus. This would complete a new forensic research powerhouse in our state with the location of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation’s Forensic Science Center and UCO’s new Forensic Science Institute across from each other in Edmond. With agreements such as the one UCO made last week with a nationally recognized lab in South Carolina, Oklahoma is poised to become a center of forensic research and education unparalleled anywhere else. That’s good not only for UCO, but also for the Edmond and state economies as private resources relocate to be near such synergistic partnerships.

With the amount of resource sharing made possible by this move, it only makes sense to help the Medical Examiner’s office achieve a new start. The agency is underfunded, under-staffed and trying to shake off scandal from prior employees’ poor actions. Now is the time to plan for a better future for this agency. The proposal made in Senate Bill 738 is to issue a $30 million bond for a new building to be located on the UCO campus.

We understand there are many needs piling up at the state’s doorstep, especially as the purse strings are continuing to tighten for next year. We also understand that Oklahoma has a history of allowing problems to linger while we all bemoan a lack of funding. But lack of funding or no, our citizens deserve some dignity, even in death.