The Maryland Attorney General’s Office this year is expected to begin its review of autopsies of people who died in police custody during the 17-year span that former chief medical examiner David Fowler served, a first-of-its-kind probe sparked by Fowler’s testimony in defense of the Minneapolis police officer on trial for murder in the death of George Floyd.
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Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D), who announced the audit of the cases in April, has not commented on the scale of the review or who will be conducting it.
In September, he selected a “design team,” an independent panel of experts from around the world, and tasked it with shaping “the scope and methodology of the audit, including the manner in which cases for review will be selected.” A spokeswoman for Frosh’s office said recently that the review team could be announced in coming weeks.
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The review of in-custody deaths in Maryland follows Fowler’s testimony during the murder trial of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin over Floyd’s in-custody death in 2020, which was at the center of a national reckoning on race and policing. Fowler’s testimony blamed Floyd’s death on heart disease and drug use rather than his oxygen being cut off while pinned beneath Chauvin’s knee for more than nine minutes.
Roger Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner in the District, said he listened to Fowler’s testimony and was “confused,” a reaction that led him and other health professionals to push for a review of cases handled during the years Fowler led Maryland’s agency.
“There may be an apparent use of ‘undetermined manner of death’ when indeed the death was at the hands of another, which would create a determination of homicide,” Mitchell said in an interview. “And so the question … is whether or not the deaths in custody in Maryland are … getting the proper designation of cause and manner of death. And that becomes important for those cases and for those families.”
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Mitchell said the effort is not to disparage the Maryland medical examiner’s office or its work. Instead, he said, the issue is whether in-custody deaths are treated differently from other cases.
Fowler did not respond to an email seeking comment.
According to a public information request filed by The Washington Post, there were about 1,300 “in-custody” deaths that were handled by the Maryland medical examiner’s office from 2002 to 2019, when Fowler led the agency.
The number includes “any cases in which an agent of government was involved in any way,” a spokesman for the state Department of Health said in an email. Those “include, but are not limited to, pedestrians struck during vehicular pursuits, individuals who took their own lives in jail, individuals who died of overdoses while in jail, and more.”
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It remains unclear how many of those cases will be part of the attorney general’s review.
“The sheer number of people who have died in state custody, whether in police encounters or prisons and jails, is immense and disturbing, and should give us all pause,” said Sonia Kumar, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which has pushed for more accountability and transparency in policing. “We seek what families have sought: honest assessments of how people in custody died, so we can learn and prevent future needless deaths.”
One of the names on the list is Anton Black, a 19-year-old college student who died in fall 2018 after an encounter with police on the Eastern Shore. Black’s death, which was eerily similar to Floyd’s, was ruled an accident by the medical examiner’s office. Responding to a call about a possible kidnapping, officers wrestled the young man to the ground. Video footage released later showed the officers in Greensboro, Md., struggling with Black before pinning him down. Black died, and no officers were charged in his death.
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Black’s case is one of 67 in which “accident” is listed as the manner of death. Of those, 48 involved a Black or Hispanic person.
Nearly 200 of the cases were ruled “undetermined,” and the overwhelming majority of those involved Black people.
State Sen. Jill P. Carter (D-Baltimore City) sent a letter last summer to Gov. Larry Hogan (R) thanking him for supporting Frosh’s decision to launch a review and for his “commitment to ensuring the people of Maryland receive reports completed with integrity and impartiality when their loved one dies.”
Black’s family has publicly thanked Hogan for the long-awaited release of Black’s autopsy results. For months, the family, who filed a federal lawsuit in 2020 against the officers, the medical examiner, the three towns where the officers served and the two police chiefs involved in the case, had not received any information about his death until Hogan made comments about the incident.
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Carter said she hopes the audit is fair and transparent.
“The people of Maryland, as well as the rest of our nation, are watching to see how this will be handled in our state,” she wrote. “We have heard from a number of families, of those who died in police custody, that believed for a long time that the reports they received, from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner when their loved one died, were inaccurate, biased and devoid of sufficient investigation. These families have had to live with a feeling of injustice and lack of accountability on top of grief.”
Kumar joined Carter in asking for a thorough review and, potentially, changes in the process.
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“We must see revised practices going forward, to protect against the failures that brought us to this point and created a situation where all medical examiner rulings are called into question,” she said. “We owe at least this much to the families — most of whom are Black — who have had to fight their own state for basic accountability for the deaths of their loved ones, only to be let down again and again.”
John D. Harden contributed to this report.