Judge: No court order to alter same-sex death certificates

TALLAHASSEE — Gay widows and widowers whose spouses died before the U.S. Supreme Court declared state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional can have the death certificates of their loved ones changed without having to go to court, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

The decision is the latest ruling from U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle against the state on the issue of same-sex marriages and was hailed as a major victory by Lambda Legal, which represented the plaintiffs in a classaction suit filed in 2015.

The plaintiffs sought to have the death certificates of their spouses show they had been married, but the state argued that Florida law prohibited officials from changing the documents without a court order.

“Not so,” Hinkle wrote in Thursday’s eight-page opinion.

His ruling came more than two years after he struck down Florida’s voter-approved ban on gay marriage in November 2014. Cementing Hinkle’s decision in a landmark case known as Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court months later ruled that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry.

While Florida officials complied with the Obergefell decision by including the names of samesex spouses on death certificates for people who died after the June 2015 ruling, the state maintained that the Office of Vital Statistics required a court order to amend the documents of those who had died prior to the decision. But Hinkle disagreed. “As a matter of federal constitutional law, a state cannot properly refuse to correct a federal constitutional violation going forward, even if the violation arose before the dispute over the constitutional issue was settled,” he wrote. “If the law were otherwise, the schools might still be segregated.”

The state “must correct a constitutional error that affected a death certificate’s information on both marital status and a spouse’s identity,” he ordered.