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He made a medical judgement as he should have, not a legal judgement.

If the coroner used the term "homicide" then it is a legal judgment and not a medical judgment. Homicide has a specific legal meaning and that meaning is that the death was directly caused by the actions of another human being. "The killing of a human being by another human being."

The fact that this man died in a struggle with the police does not mean that his death was the result of anything other than his own actions. If he had died of a head blow or died of internal injuries as the result of being hit by the officer's clubs, then it would be proper to say it was a homicide. But since his death was caused by his body's inability to deal with the overexertion caused by his struggle against a lawful detention, the term homicide is not applicable. The proper finding would have been death by natural causes as a result of personal overexertion.

To call this a homicide is reckless, especially in a community that is constantly on the edge of a race riot. This should be reviewed and if it is determined that it is not a homicide, then the coroner should be fired. To most uneducated people --like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton -- the term homicide is synonymous with murder.

They only had 4 choices though. Undetermined causes (they know why he died); Suicide (he didn't actually kill himself in the sense of shooting himself and even though he had drugs in his system, the coroner said it was not a lethal amt); natural causes (dying in your sleep); or homicide.

I sat on a coroner's jury a few years ago here in Dupage county, and if I remember our instructions correctly the doctor made the right judgement. For example, a mugger sticks a gun in the face of an overweight individual, the individual dies of a heart attack, is this Homicide or Natural causes? Of course it is a homicide because the death was caused by outside forces. Is the mugger convicted of murder, possibly, although that is a separate legal judgement.

I can see you prefer the sort of coroner who "goes along to get along" with the DA and the police, and who shapes his findings to serve their interests.
I prefer physicians who retain the intellectual integrity to call'em as they see 'em, and not just be a lapdog of the prosecution