Death within a White Settler Frame: On the Implausibility of Value Neutral Autopsy Science

• In Event: Abolitionist Environmentalism

Abstract

Medical examiner/coroner offices across the nation are public-facing scientific institutions that attempt to be politically neutral and distinct from prosecutorial authority and law enforcement. Coroner reports and autopsies conducted after a death under police custody have authority at the nexus of public health, forensic science, and state law. This authority is especially salient for homicides not involving firearms as these cases present biomedical ambiguities that must be solved through empirical observation informed by the research, experience, and worldview of the medical examiner/coroner. This paper investigates the historical formation of this worldview and its larger epistemic environment as post-mortem medical examination reports rarely establish police culpability even when evidence indicates otherwise. In the paper I explain how the history of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and scientific racism have been central to the emergence and development of medical examiner/coroner science in the U.S. since the 18th century and continue to haunt the study of non-white death while under police custody. Informed by a collaborative data science project analyzing police death over the last 20 years I recount the formation of medical examiner/coroner offices in Jamestown, Virginia, Los Angeles, California, and Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan, corresponding respectively to the periods of white settler colonialization, western expansion of American empire, and racial segregation. Considering this long view of history, I offer reflections on “the myth of the given” within science to argue against the use of value neutral forensic pathology and objective autopsy analysis as tools for abolishing law-enforcement related death.

Author

• Terence Keel, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)