
{"id":860,"date":"2011-11-27T15:11:21","date_gmt":"2011-11-27T21:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/?p=860"},"modified":"2011-11-27T15:11:21","modified_gmt":"2011-11-27T21:11:21","slug":"family-awarded-1-million-from-medical-examiners-office-that-kept-their-sons-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/family-awarded-1-million-from-medical-examiners-office-that-kept-their-sons-brain.html","title":{"rendered":"Family Awarded $1 Million From Medical Examiner&#8217;s Office That Kept Their Son&#8217;s Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Justice sometimes does triumph.<\/p>\r\n<p>A Staten Island, N.Y.,\u00a0couple has won a $1 million judgment against the New York City Medical Examiner&#8217;s Office, which retained their dead son&#8217;s brain without their permission or knowledge, the New York Post reported Saturday.<\/p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nypost.com\/p\/news\/local\/staten_island\/sitting_on_their_brains_rYp0ijgNEZRVOmtijfRMMK\">http:\/\/www.nypost.com\/p\/news\/local\/staten_island\/sitting_on_their_brains_rYp0ijgNEZRVOmtijfRMMK<\/a><\/p>\r\n<p>In a macabre twist in an already freaky case, the parents of Jesse Shipley, 17, didn&#8217;t discover that\u00a0they didn&#8217;t have his brain until some of his high school friends saw it in a marked jar during a field trip to\u00a0Staten Island&#8217;s morgue.<\/p>\r\n<p>Jesse was killed in a car crash in January 2005, and was autopsied by the local medical examiner. But the Medical Examiner&#8217;s Office returned Jesse&#8217;s body to his parents for burial without his brain, without mentioning that little tidbit to the Shipley family.\u00a0Doctors wanted to perform tests on the organ, according to the Post.<\/p>\r\n<p>Jesse&#8217;s family only learned that their son&#8217;s body was missing its brain when they buried it\u00a0because of the shocking incident during the field trip.\u00a0That when Jesse&#8217;s schoolmates chanced upon his brain in the jar, the Post reported.<\/p>\r\n<p>Needless to say, the teens told Shipley&#8217;s surprised\u00a0family what they had seen.\u00a0If that wasn&#8217;t disturbing enough,\u00a0&#8220;a Catholic priest\u00a0told the family that Jesse&#8217;s burial wasn&#8217;t proper without his brain,&#8221; according to the Post.<\/p>\r\n<p>The family didn&#8217;t get the brain back until October 2005, and they subsequently filed suit against the\u00a0Medical Examiner&#8217;s Office.\u00a0The city was liable, according to a\u00a0Staten Island Supreme Court judge,\u00a0under the so-called right of\u00a0sepulcher, which says that a family is entitled to all the remains of a relative, according to the Post.<\/p>\r\n<p>The defense didn&#8217;t have\u00a0a leg to stand on. The city apparently contended that Jesse&#8217;s father Andre Shipley &#8220;would have\u00a0known his son&#8217;s brain were being kept for further testing if he&#8217;d known to ask,&#8221; the Post reported.<\/p>\r\n<p>What?<\/p>\r\n<p>It probably didn&#8217;t help the defense&#8217;s case, either, when\u00a0a medical examiner said he keep Jesse&#8217;s brain hanging around in a jar because\u00a0he waits until he has a half dozen brains before calling in a neuropathic examiner to study them, the Post said.<\/p>\r\n<p>We hope in those other\u00a0cases that the families knew their loved one&#8217;s brains had been withheld from them, unlike the Shipleys.<\/p>\r\n<p>The Shipleys did lose one legal acton last\u00a0year, when the family sued claiming that their son&#8217;s brain had been displayed\u00a0unlawfully. An appellate court threw that claim out, the Post reported.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Justice sometimes does triumph. A Staten Island, N.Y.,\u00a0couple has won a $1 million judgment against the New York City Medical Examiner&#8217;s Office, which retained their dead son&#8217;s brain without their permission or knowledge, the New York Post reported Saturday. http:\/\/www.nypost.com\/p\/news\/local\/staten_island\/sitting_on_their_brains_rYp0ijgNEZRVOmtijfRMMK In a macabre twist in an already freaky case, the parents of Jesse Shipley, 17, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,24,4,445],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brain-injury","tag-brain-injury-attorney","tag-medical-malpractice","tag-suing-medical-examiner"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":866,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}