PASSAGE OF THE DAY: “The lawsuit, which seeks punitive damages and new policies at the medical examiner’s office, among other remedies, accuses that office of classifying the death “utterly improperly and in contravention of medical evidence and the standards of their profession.” It says the medical examiner’s office kept pushing a police narrative that Black may have been on drugs even after two toxicology reports showed otherwise. Advocates say Black’s death is eerily similar to the killing of Floyd, who died in 2020 after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck. Floyd’s death sparked outrage across the country, forcing a reckoning about systemic racism and policing."
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STORY: “Maryland repeatedly mislabeled police custody deaths,” The Washington Post (Reporter Steve Thompson) reports, on November 18 2022. (Steve Thompson writes about government and politics in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, he was an investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He started in journalism as a police reporter at the St. Petersburg Times.)
GIST: “The deaths of people in police custody are ruled homicides far less than they should be in Maryland, lawyers suing the state medical examiner’s office argued this week in an analysis for the case of Anton Black, an Eastern Shore teen whose 2018 death prompted historic reform.
The family of Black, a Black teenager who died during an encounter with White police officers, settled with most parties in a wrongful death suit this summer but continued a challenge against the medical examiner’s office.
The office ruled Black’s death accidental, saying that it was “likely that the stress of his struggle” with police contributed to his death, as did bipolar disorder and underlying heart issues.
Lawyers for his family contrasted that finding with a best practice for medical examiners called the “but-for” principle. If a death would not have happened “but for” an unnatural factor, it should be classified as unnatural, according to a 2002 guide by the National Association of Medical Examiners.
The lawyers identified 57 cases where people died in police custody in potential restraint situations, and they found that 88 percent were not ruled homicides, “even when the decedent had been Tased, pepper sprayed, subject to police baton strikes, prone restraint, or other uses of force,” according to the court filing.
“The State is supposed to tell us the truth,” one of the lawyers on the case, Sonia Kumar, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland, said in a statement. “Instead, for decades, it has misled Marylanders by claiming police did not cause the deaths of people in their custody...”
The profile of the medical examiner’s office was elevated after its former chief, David Fowler, in 2021 testified that the death of George Floyd — whose case police reform advocates say echoes Black’s — was of “undetermined” causes, linking it to heart disease and drug use rather than to his oxygen being cut off from the pressure of a police officer’s knee.
Last month, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) ordered a detailed review of 100 autopsies performed during Fowler’s tenure of people who died in law enforcement custody after a team of experts determined that further scrutiny was warranted. Fowler’s testimony prompted the probe, which spanned his 17 years at the medical examiner’s office, from 2002 to 2019.
Black died after being wrestled to the ground and restrained face-down while in handcuffs. His autopsy said “no evidence was found that restraint by law enforcement directly caused or significantly caused or significantly contributed” to his death. No one was criminally charged in his case.
The NAME guide states that “Deaths due to positional restraint induced by law enforcement personnel or to chokeholds or other measures to subdue may be classified as Homicide.” The guide defined homicide as a death resulting “from a volitional act committed by another person,” emphasizing that it does not imply criminal intent.
Fowler did not respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.
He said in an email last month that “I am proud of my seventeen years of service as Maryland’s Chief Medical Examiner, and I am confident that any fair review will confirm that the Office met or exceeded all applicable professional standards.”
Maryland’s interim chief medical examiner, John Stash, referred comment Thursday to Department of Health spokesman Chase Cook, who said in an email that “We have no comment regarding matters in litigation.”
Three small towns on Maryland’s Eastern Shore settled their part of the case in August, agreeing to pay Black’s family $5 million and institute changes in policing to prevent more deaths involving police.
A package of accountability bills approved by Maryland lawmakers last year included a measure in Black’s memory that requires increased transparency of public misconduct records.
The lawsuit, which seeks punitive damages and new policies at the medical examiner’s office, among other remedies, accuses that office of classifying the death “utterly improperly and in contravention of medical evidence and the standards of their profession.”
It says the medical examiner’s office kept pushing a police narrative that Black may have been on drugs even after two toxicology reports showed otherwise.
Advocates say Black’s death is eerily similar to the killing of Floyd, who died in 2020 after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck. Floyd’s death sparked outrage across the country, forcing a reckoning about systemic racism and policing.
The attorney general’s probe began with a pool of about 1,300 autopsies, but a panel named by Frosh has narrowed the focus to 100 deaths that “occurred during or shortly after the decedent was physically restrained, and for which no obvious medical cause of death, such as a knife wound, was discerned during the autopsy,” according to a report by the panel released last month.
The attorney general’s office has not identified the 100 cases, but the ACLU lawyers assembled their similar pool of 57 cases out of the 1,300 by using news stories and medical examiner news releases, according to the court filing.
The push to remake policing takes decades, only to begin again
The lawsuit says the gravity of what it alleges is a pattern of misclassified cases “cannot be overstated.” Findings by the medical examiner’s office “dictate how police understand their actions; how state’s attorneys decide whether to prosecute; whether decedents and their families are treated as victims; the hurdles survivors must clear to obtain relief; the scope of any given public health crisis; and how our society determines which deaths can be prevented.”
“And the brunt of these failures has been borne disproportionately by Black Marylanders and, often, people with disabilities,” the lawsuit states."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog; SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL: https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985 FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices." Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; ————————————————————————————————— FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true! Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project; ----------------------------------------------------------- |
