Greetings, readers. I apologize for my inactivity of late. I caught a bug after Thanksgiving that has knocked me on my butt for the last week.
I do have a few items in the queue for you. But until I can get back at it, I want to let you know about a piece I’ve been working on for several months that was recently published in the New Republic. It uses in-custody police deaths to examine the problems with our death investigation system, particularly when it comes to bias among medical examiners.
It also involves the death of George Floyd and the ongoing fallout from the trial of Derek Chauvin. The far right has been trying to ret-con comments made by the Minneapolis medical examiner to claim that Floyd died of natural causes and Chauvin was framed.
That isn’t at all what happened. But demagogues like Tucker Carlson are dangerously close to having a point. It just isn’t the point they think they’re making.
Here’s an excerpt:
In the summer of 2021, the body of 29-year-old Damien Cameron was delivered to the crime lab in Jackson, Mississippi. Cameron, a Black man, had died after a struggle with police. His face was swollen and bloodied, and there was bleeding in his neck. Witnesses described seeing two deputies kneeling on Cameron for more than 10 minutes. Yet Staci Turner, the state’s medical examiner, ruled Cameron’s manner of death to be “undetermined.” That decision effectively headed off any further investigation. The officers returned to work.
Two years later, Rankin County Deputy Hunter Elward, one of the officers who had knelt on Cameron, pleaded guilty to federal charges in another case—the horrific torture of two Black men. Elward and a gang of his fellow deputies, who called themselves the Goon Squad, admitted to breaking into the men’s home, torturing and sexually humiliating them, then sticking a gun into the mouth of one of the men, at which point the deputies claim it mistakenly fired, leaving the man with severe and disfiguring injuries.
The fallout from the torture cases brought new attention to Turner’s work in Cameron’s death. In a subsequent review, three separate medical examiners said that Turner was wrong to classify Cameron’s manner of death as “undetermined.” They say it was clearly a homicide. If it had been classified that way at the time, it’s possible that a criminal investigation might have taken Elward off the street, and might have revealed the rot in the sheriff’s department.
Cameron’s death came 14 months after the death of George Floyd, and there are clear similarities. Both men died after one or more police officers knelt on their backs. Both cases involve disputes between forensic pathologists about manner of death, and both raise important questions not only about how that determination is made but about whether medical examiners are adequately shielded from political pressure when making it . . .
About two months before the Chauvin trial, a team of researchers led by London-based cognitive neurologist Itiel Dror published a study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that, along with the trial, would open an ongoing feud within the medical examiner community.
Dror and his team asked 133 medical examiners to review an autopsy report of a child’s death and determine if the death was accidental, a homicide, or if there was insufficient information to make a determination. The participants were given identical autopsy reports, with two exceptions. Half were told that the deceased child was Black and had died while in the care of the mother’s boyfriend. The other half were told the child was white and had been in the care of a grandmother.
This information should have been irrelevant to the manner of death. While it’s true that Black children are more likely to die from homicide, and it’s also true that stepfathers or love interests of a child’s mother are more likely to kill a child than a grandmother, neither of those things should be relevant when determining how a specific child died in a specific case. We don’t convict people based on generalizations about the demographic groups to which they or their victims belong.
Or at least we shouldn’t. The study suggested that perhaps sometimes we do. The medical examiners given the scenario with the Black child were five times more likely to rule the death a homicide than those with the white child. There was also broad disagreement among the study’s participants about whether there was sufficient information to even make a manner of death determination . . .
The Dror studies, the response to them, and what we’ve learned from these high-profile deaths in police custody should prompt some weighty questions about how we investigate suspicious deaths in the United States. If medical examiners can’t even agree on manner of death in one of the most closely followed, consequential trials in recent memory—one involving what is likely the most-witnessed homicide in human history—how can we rely on their expertise to send people to prison, or to determine if we should continue to trust that a police officer should remain on the job after that officer has taken a life?
You can read the whole thing here.
Coincidentally, at about the same time that my piece was published, the New York Times published an extensive investigation into the sheriff’s department whose deputies killed Cameron. It’s a hell of a report. A couple excerpts:
Reporters examined hundreds of pages of court records and sheriff’s office reports and interviewed more than 50 people who say they witnessed or experienced torture at the hands of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. What emerged was a pattern of violence that was neither confined to a small group of deputies nor hidden from department leaders.
The Times and Mississippi Today identified 20 deputies who were present at one or more of the incidents — many assigned to narcotics or the night patrol — but also several high-ranking officials: a former undersheriff, former detectives and a former deputy who is now a local police chief.
As is often the case, there’s a history, here.
Among the officers of that era accused of beating Black residents was Lloyd Jones, a state trooper who would become sheriff in nearby Simpson County.
A Justice Department investigation long after his death found that he had bragged to a colleague about fatally shooting a Black man, Benjamin Brown, in the back during a 1967 standoff between police officers and civil rights protesters.
In 1970, Mr. Jones participated in the beating of the Rev. John Perkins in the Rankin County jail, which culminated with a deputy jabbing a fork up his nose, according to the pastor and witnesses who testified against the officers.
As sheriff, he gave Bryan Bailey his first job in law enforcement.
“He is on my life’s wall of gratitude and had a huge impact on who I am,” Sheriff Bailey wrote on Facebook in 2015. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him or recall something that he taught me.”
Sheriff Bailey called him a mentor. But years before, Simpson County residents had begun calling him something else: “Goon” Jones.
It’s unclear when Rankin County deputies adopted their nickname, but last year, they ordered commemorative coins emblazoned with cartoonish gangsters and the words “Lt. Middleton’s Goon Squad.” Lt. Jeffrey Middleton was the squad’s supervisor. He is among the five deputies who pleaded guilty to criminal charges stemming from the January raid on Mr. Parker and Mr. Jenkins.
A Justice Department investigation this year found that Rankin County deputies chose the name Goon Squad “because of their willingness to use excessive force and not report it.”
Over 50 deputies implicated. They’re accused of wanton civil rights violations, including torture. They broke into people’s homes without a warrant, after which they beat residents, tased them, waterboarded them, and sexually humiliated them, among other abuses. And then they had challenge coins made to commemorate it all.
This makes my head and heart hurt.
The first episode of the Actual Innocence podcast is about exoneree Greg Taylor. In his case, a state crime lab technician testified blood found on his truck was consistent with human blood. The technician knew as he testified it was animal blood (deer, IIRC), but the state lab had a policy of hiding any exculpatory reports.
Medical examiners aren't different. They are part of the prosecution team. They often get briefed by the investigators prior to performing autopsies, and that information informs and influences their conclusions. I think the paragraphs in Radley's NR article about how a homeless man beaten by a gang would be examined vice one beaten by police is a key point.