A Comparative Study of Medical Examiner/Coroner Offices in the United States

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Project Summary/Abstract Native, Black, and Latinx people are disproportionately killed during police encounters and these murders are rarely prosecuted. Much of the social justice-driven research on police violence has focused on legal and political interventions that govern law enforcement practices. This project takes a different approach by examining the science of the autopsy, the American medical examiner/coroner system, and the nation’s long legacy of policing and state-sanctioned violence against communities of color. The medical examiner/coroner system in the United States plays an integral, but often overlooked, role in determining whether police are held accountable for deaths that occur under their custody. However, medical examiner/coroner reports rarely establish police culpability even when evidence indicates otherwise. This project undertakes archival research informed by media and federal government data on nationwide death under police custody to recover and document the history of three medical examiner/coroner offices that have played pivotal roles during the periods of English settler colonialism, the westward expansion of American empire, and racial segregation following the Great Migration of Black communities to Northern cities. To this end, the project will request and analyze images, documents, microfilm, and other materials from the medical examiner office in Jamestown, Virginia, the country’s first medical examiner office founded during the era of colonial settlement. This project will also study the Los Angeles Medical Examiner Office founded after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) in the city that is the current incarceration center of the world. Finally, we will study the history of the Wayne County Medical Examiner in Detroit, Michigan which is the nation’s most racially segregated city now undergoing rapid gentrification. Through these efforts, the project seeks to produce a peer-reviewed book monograph, a series of articles for public audiences, and the development of policy recommendations for reforming the medical examiner/coroner system. This project intends to offer new insights about the history of the U.S. medical examiner system and the politics of autopsy science that will inform the work of public health officials, community activists, lawmakers, and academic scholars working on tracking mortality from legal intervention and creating social justice reforms within policing, law enforcement, and incarceration.