...no. Of course I gather that some US states also elect coroners as well, which is remarkable.
The idea that the coroners are 'independent' is one of the more blatant fictions that is reproduced constantly in the public sphere. The coroners, like all other institutions in bourgeois society, ultimately serve the class that rules over the rest of us. Confirmation of death, for example, has almost always been used to declare Socialist ideologues and comrades dead. The fact that they sometimes certifies the death of members of the Capitalist ruling-class is part of the theater of bourgeois democracy, whereby the public is given the show of actually getting rid of horrible people like Thatcher, and thereby avoiding longer term or deeper structural changes to the system.
For example if bourgeois establishment coroners hadn't "confirmed" Lenin's death, he could have gone on spreading his message for the coming centuries and we would have already had a global workers' people's republic without false unelected judges imposing the tyranny of free market economics and neoliberal "liberty" upon us!
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