Undone Justice: Social Determinants of Health, Routine Toxicological Screenings, and Death Investigations

• In Event: Toxic Subjects: Historical, Legal, Occupational, and Medical Perspectives - II

Abstract

This talk seeks to describe how the specific arrangement of the priorities and practices between the legal, scientific research, and medical fields results in partial death accounts, thereby contributing to a conspiratorial cover-up of racial and class violence. Statistical evidence and policy research into the relationship between Social Determinants of Health and inequality along racial and class lines has greatly contributed to the discussions of Environmental Injustice. However, linking specific deaths within areas recognized as having experiencing what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence,’ or what Environmental Injustice scholars identify as racial and class violence, has hitherto remained difficult. In part this is due to the types of data that are available, namely, layers and correlations between demographics data, the history of public policy, toxic industrial and environmental hazards, and a lack of either political interest or power. One path available for tracing specific deaths to statistical descriptions of differences in mortality rates is available with toxicological screenings of the dead. However, because what is considered ‘useful’ in routine toxicological screenings by forensic death investigators are primarily defined by the needs of criminal investigators, traces of social and political violence go unrecorded. Understanding death investigators’ ability to provide accurate descriptions of what is known as the Manner, Cause, and Mechanism of Death is limited will identify where and how policy decisions could be made to contribute evidence to Environmental Injustice scholarship.

Author

• Lee Nelson, RPI