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TimS comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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I agree that it isn't legally trivial. But the social consequences of labeling a death as suicide are much more immediate than any financial consequences from labeling a death as accidental. Also, I'm not sure what percentage of the suicidal have life insurance, so I'm not sure how much weight the hypothetical coroner would place on the life insurance issue.
I'm not saying the position is rational or morally correct, but it wouldn't surprise me that an influential person like a coroner held a position vaguely like "screw insurance companies." (>>75%)
By contrast, I would be extremely surprised to learn that a coroner was willing to ignore an infanticide, absent collusion (i.e. bribery) of some kind (<<<1%)
(I don't believe CharlieSheen's anecdote either. I was challenging the suicide point in isolation.)
Say what now? Possibly it's because my background is Jewish, not Christian, but I don't buy that at all.
Normatively, suicide is shameful in modern society. By contrast, I don't think most suicide-victim families (or their social network) are thinking about the life insurance proceeds at the time (within a week?) that the coroner is determining cause of death.
I know I've heard of a survey of coroner in which some substantial percentage (20-50%, sorry don't remember better) of coroners reported that the following had ever occurred in their career: they believed the cause of death of the body they were examining was suicide, but listed the cause as accident.
I can't find that survey in a quick search, but this research result talks about the effect of elected coroners on cause of death determinations. Specifically, elected coroners were slightly less likely to declare suicide as the cause of death.