In many legal jurisdictions, the manner of death is a determination, typically made by the

coroner A coroner is a government or judicial official who is empowered to conduct or order an inquest into the manner or cause of death, and to investigate or confirm the identity of an unknown person who has been found dead within the coroner's jur ...

, medical examiner, police, or similar officials, and recorded as a vital statistic. Within the United States and the United Kingdom, a distinction is made between the

cause of death In law, medicine, and statistics, cause of death is an official determination of conditions resulting in a human's death, which may be recorded on a death certificate. A cause of death is determined by a medical examiner. The cause of death is ...

, which is a specific disease or injury, versus manner of death, which is primarily a legal determination versus the mechanism of death (also called the mode of death) which does not explain why the person died or the underlying cause of death and can include cardiac arrest or exsanguination. Different categories are used in different jurisdictions, but manner of death determinations include everything from very broad categories like "natural" and "homicide" to specific manners like "traffic accident" or "gunshot wound". In some cases an

autopsy An autopsy (post-mortem examination, obduction, necropsy, or autopsia cadaverum) is a surgical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a corpse by dissection to determine the cause, mode, and manner of death or to evaluate any dis ...

is performed, either due to general legal requirements, because the medical cause of death is uncertain, upon the request of family members or guardians, or because the circumstances of death were suspicious. International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes can be used to record manner and cause of death in a systematic way that makes it easy to compile statistics and more feasible to compare events across jurisdictions.National Center for Health Statistics �
Classification of Death and Injury Resulting from Terrorism – How are external cause of injury codes assigned?

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georg ...

. retrieved July 7 2019

Terminology

Death by natural causes

A death by natural causes results from an illness and its complications or an internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces, other than infectious disease. For example, a person dying from complications from pneumonia,

diarrheal disease Diarrhea, also spelled diarrhoea, is the condition of having at least three loose, liquid, or watery bowel movements each day. It often lasts for a few days and can result in dehydration due to fluid loss. Signs of dehydration often begin wi ...

or HIV/AIDS (infections), cancer, stroke or

heart disease Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels. CVD includes coronary artery diseases (CAD) such as angina and myocardial infarction (commonly known as a heart attack). Other CVDs include stroke, h ...

(internal body malfunctions), or sudden organ failure would most likely be listed as having died from natural causes. "Death by natural causes" is sometimes used as a euphemism for "dying of old age", which is considered problematic as a cause of death (as opposed to a specific

age-related disease An aging-associated disease (commonly termed age-related disease, ARD) is a disease that is most often seen with increasing frequency with increasing senescence. They are essentially complications of senescence, distinguished from the aging proc ...

); there are also many non-age-related causes of "natural" death, for legal manner-of-death purposes. (See )

Unnatural causes

An unnatural death results from an external cause, typically including homicides, suicides, accidents,

medical error A medical error is a preventable adverse effect of care ("iatrogenesis"), whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavio ...

alcohol intoxication Alcohol intoxication, also known as alcohol poisoning, commonly described as drunkenness or inebriation, is the negative behavior and physical effects caused by a recent consumption of alcohol. In addition to the toxicity of ethanol, the main p ...

s and drug overdoses. Jurisdictions differ in how they categorize and report unnatural deaths, including level of detail and whether they are considered a single category with subcategories, or separate top-level categories. There is no international standard on whether or how to classify a death as natural vs. unnatural. "Mechanism of death" is sometimes used to refer to the

proximate cause In law and insurance, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to an injury that the courts deem the event to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. C ...

of death, which might differ from the cause that is used to classify the manner of death. For example, the proximate cause or mechanism of death might be

brain ischemia Brain ischemia is a condition in which there is insufficient bloodflow to the brain to meet metabolic demand. This leads to poor oxygen supply or cerebral hypoxia and thus leads to the death of brain tissue or cerebral infarction/ischemic stroke. ...

(lack of blood flow to the brain), caused by a malignant neoplasm ( cancer), in turn caused by a dose of ionizing radiation administered by a person with intent to kill or injure, leading to certification of the manner of death as "homicide". The manner of death can be recorded as "undetermined" if there is not enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion. For example, the discovery of a partial human skeleton indicates a death, but might not provide enough evidence to determine a cause.

Categories by jurisdiction

United States

In the United States, a manner of death is expressed as belonging to one classification of a group of six possible:Snohomish County Government, Washingto
Cause & Manner of Death
retrieved April 27, 2019 * Natural *

Accident An accident is an unintended, normally unwanted event that was not directly caused by humans. The term ''accident'' implies that nobody should be blamed, but the event may have been caused by unrecognized or unaddressed risks. Most researcher ...

* Suicide * Homicide * Undetermined * Pending In some jurisdictions, some more detailed manners may be reported in numbers broken out from the main four or five. For example: * Legal intervention (e.g.

capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...

) * Act of war * Automobile accidents * Deaths of prison inmates by acute intoxication

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, when people die, either a doctor writes an acceptable natural cause of death medical certificate, or a

( procurator fiscal in Scotland) investigates the case. Coroners are independent judicial officers who investigate deaths reported to them, and subsequently whatever inquiries are necessary to discover the cause of death, this includes ordering a post-mortem examination, obtaining witness statements and medical records, or holding an inquest. In the unified legal jurisdiction of England and Wales, most deaths are certified by doctors without autopsy or coroner involvement. Almost all deaths certified by the coroner involve an

but most do not involve a formal inquest. In England and Wales, a specific list of choices for verdicts is not mandated, and "narrative verdicts" are allowed, which are not specifically classified. The verdicts aggregated by the Ministry of Justice are: – Table 6: Inquest verdicts returned, 1994-2008 * Homicide ** Killed unlawfully ** Killed lawfully * Suicide * Attempted or self-induced

abortion Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus. An abortion that occurs without intervention is known as a miscarriage or "spontaneous abortion"; these occur in approximately 30% to 40% of pregnan ...

* Cause of death aggravated by lack of care, or self-neglect * Dependence on drugs * Non-dependent abuse of drugs * Want of attention at birth * Death from industrial diseases * Death by

accident An accident is an unintended, normally unwanted event that was not directly caused by humans. The term ''accident'' implies that nobody should be blamed, but the event may have been caused by unrecognized or unaddressed risks. Most researcher ...

or misadventure * Stillborn * Death from natural causes * Open verdict *

Disaster A disaster is a serious problem occurring over a short or long period of time that causes widespread human, material, economic or environmental loss which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources ...

Other jurisdictions

Some jurisdictions place deaths in absentia, such as deaths at sea and missing persons declared dead in a court of law, in the "Undetermined" category on the grounds that due to the fact-finder's lack of ability to examine the body, the examiner has no personal knowledge of the manner of (assumed) death; others classify such deaths in an additional category "Other," reserving "Undetermined" for deaths in which the fact-finder has access to the body, but the information provided by the body and examination of it is insufficient to provide sufficient grounds for a determination. The

Norwegian Medical Association The Norwegian Medical Association ( no, Den norske lægeforening (1886–2008), spelled ''Den norske legeforening'' since 2008) is the main Norwegian medical association and trade union A trade union (labor union in American English), often ...

classifies what other jurisdictions might call "undetermined" as "unnatural": * Sudden and unexpected death of an unknown cause * Deaths in prison or while in civilian or military detention

Legal implications

A death ruled as homicide or unlawful killing is typically referred to police or prosecutor or equivalent official for investigation and

criminal charge A criminal charge is a formal accusation made by a governmental authority (usually a public prosecutor or the police) asserting that somebody has committed a crime. A charging document, which contains one or more criminal charges or counts, can ...

s if warranted. Deaths caused by

, though homicides, are generally assumed to be lawful and are not prosecuted. Most deaths due to war are not prosecuted, unless there is evidence of a war crime, in which case troops on foreign territory might be prosecuted by the military justice system, domestic law enforcement, or the International Criminal Court. Some insurance contracts, such as life insurance policies, have special rules for certain manners of death. Suicide, for example, may invalidate claims under terms of such a contract.

References

External links

DEATH FROM NATURAL CAUSES – CERTIFICATE OF TREATING OR EXAMINING DOCTOR – Form 3 – Burial and Cremation Act 2013 (section 10)
(Australia) {{death * Medical terminology Public health