Forensic Failures: 36 Police-Custody Deaths Should Have Been Ruled a Homicide, Audit Finds
Independent audit finds patterns of racial, pro-police bias in Maryland’s chief medical examiner’s office.
Originally published in Baltimore Beat .
An unprecedented independent audit found that 36 deaths in police custody over a two-decade span in Maryland should have been ruled homicides by the state’s top medical examiner, a stinging rebuke of Maryland‘s past efforts to investigate the deaths of those once held by law enforcement.
The yearslong audit, shared exclusively with The Baltimore Banner ahead of Thursday’s release, cited a likely reason behind the massive failure: racial and pro-police bias in the work of the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which had been led for nearly 20 years by Dr. David Fowler.
Before the audit, the deaths had been classified as accidents, natural causes or simply undetermined. But many of them involved police restraining people during arrests or shocking them with Tasers. The affected cases were spread across the state with the most — 12 — connected to Baltimore.
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