Michael M. Baden MD

I've read a number of "working with the dead" books by coroners, forensic anthropologists, pathologists, human rights advocates. American Autopsy by Michael Baden is an important addition to this volume of work. Autopsies, like pretty much everything else in the U.S. are politicized. Baden explains in his afterword, "We are at a pivotal moment in US history. I believe it's necessary to help the public understand how the criminal justice system really works—how prosecutors, medical examiners, and police sometimes work together to protect cops involved in fatal shootings or restraint deaths."

He describes case after case that he's worked on that have left him seeing that racial bias in the justice system is systematic, not merely the work of "bad cops." Not all cops are bad cops, but bad cops are protected in ways that allow them to escape responsibility for their violence, particularly against people of color.

He argues that some commonly cited causes of death—for example, psychosis with exhaustion and excited delirium—simply aren't valid medical terms. Too often death by positional asphyxia, as was the case with George Floyd, is instead ruled a heart attack exacerbated by drug use.

Given Baden's careful documentation and detailing, reading this book is rough going—but it's essential going. The U.S. has no system for tracking deaths during arrest and in custody. Law enforcement organizations can choose to provide such information to the Department of Justice, but there is no requirement that they do so. Public attention—in the form of the BLM movement, a slowly rising number of murder convictions of police, and civil suits against cities and states—is being drawn to the extent of law enforcement's racialized violence, but change won't come until this violence is seen as systematic and addressed as such.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.… (meer)

In my ever-growing (and quite unintentional) research into the endless failings of the criminal justice system, I had never considered autopsies to be a major source of fraud. Or even of any real interest. How naïve. Dr Michael Baden sets this straight in American Autopsy, based on his nearly 70 years in the business. Autopsies are politicized, just like everything else in criminal justice.

Baden seems to have been called in on pretty much every famous case there has been in this era, from President Kennedy to Martin Luther King Jr. to Attica to OJ Simpson to Eric Garner to George Floyd to mafia dons and some 20,000 others we should be considered lucky not to have to know about. What sets him apart from the numerous other medical examiners and coroners in the USA is his total faith in science. He consistently refuses to play the game of primarily being on the police and prosecutor team, preferring to let science show what actually caused death.

This has gotten him into endless trouble: “I’d been demoted, fired, mocked and denounced for telling the truth about the deaths of Black and brown victims.” But he has made his reputation soar among civil rights lawyers and the bereaved, who suddenly lose loved ones to “natural causes” or bogus diseases after what should have been a simple traffic stop. As Baden fired back at New York Mayor Ed Koch years after Koch demoted and fired him, “They don’t teach us politics in medical school.” It seems New York mayors nearly always get disenchanted with their medical examiners. The pressure from the police commissioner and the district attorneys is evidently unbearable. Politics before truth, every time, it seems.

This is far from Baden’s first book or public exposure. He has had an HBO show on autopsies for 12 years and numerous book titles. His first wife founded Odyssey House, which blossomed into an international (non methadone) chain of treatment centers for the addicted, and his second (current) wife is a star attorney in civil rights issues. So one way or another Baden has been in the spotlight, since the late 1950s. He has much knowledge to impart, and this book weaves that knowledge with what he learned about life as he approaches 90. He’s still at it, too. All of it.

Throughout his career, he kept coming up against bogus causes of death. His “colleagues” are forever inventing new diseases to exonerate police and baffle the courts. The first one he encountered is called psychosis with exhaustion. This supposedly terminal illness occurs in Black, mostly young, males, who encounter arrest. They go crazy, develop super-human strength and suddenly die without the police touching them. Or, “police must use extreme force to subdue them.” Either way, their death in custody is never the fault of the police. It was used in court on a regular basis to claim the severe beatings inflicted by police were not the cause of death.

Baden points out that no such disease exists. It is not cataloged anywhere. It is pure fiction. But it is so technical and complex sounding that judges never challenge it. Nor jurors. Even though neither has ever heard of it. If the coroner says is it was psychosis with exhaustion, that stops the conversation right there.

As the shine wore off and criticism of it rose, it was replaced by a newer version, called excited delirium. Same deal. Baden calls them (far too politely) junk science. But they have successfully prevented punishment in literally thousands of unnecessary deaths at the hands, truncheons and guns of police.

He analyzes it as simply “an invented syndrome to protect police.” They “occur” thousands of times in police matters, but never seem to occur outside contact with cops. What could the cure be then, one might want to ask.

Incredibly, it was not until the 14th of June, 2021 that the American Medical Association finally spoke up and declared excited delirium “a racist creation to justify excessive use of force.” It was, Baden says, medical racism. Doctors were complicit with corrupt police.

Another totally racist non-disease is sickle-cell trait. This one really is confined to Blacks. It is the genetic cost of having resistance to malaria. It never actually causes death – except in death certificates after police beatings. Again, in their ignorance, courts accept this as the cause of death, exonerating police.

There are other excuses. Medical examiners will claim any amount of any drugs found in the blood brought on death, rather than obvious signs of beating and choking. Heart attacks, asthma attacks, Benadryl, common cold medicines – anything but what the evidence clearly shows. It was and is up to the Michael Badens of the world to say no. He has to say it a lot. The book is collection of these stories and courtroom dramas.

Even though it has been known for decades that pressing on a prone person’s back will shut off the oxygen supply and cause death, and even though police are routinely told not do that, the message has yet to reach police officers, and numerous cases, like George Floyd’s and Eric Garner’s show the way. “I can’t breathe” might have been made famous by Eric Garner, but it is on the record as the last words of far too many of those arrested, for decades. As Baden shows, speaking need not employ the lungs, so cops laughing at victims claiming they can’t breathe yet still talking is no joke. But cops just won’t give it up, and for the most part, they get away with it.

As Baden points out, we now know, thanks to universally available video cameras, that people of color with their hands up are routinely shot in the back. They are pummeled after being handcuffed and hogtied. And when they die, it is generally from natural causes, according to their death certificates. Baden gets called in for a second autopsy, and testifies as to the true cause of death. That this is ever needed is itself criminal. What to call it when it is so common?

It is freakishly and astoundingly commonplace in the USA. Between 1980 and 2018 alone, there have officially been 17,000 fatal encounters with police. Plus, there were another 18,000 deaths inaccurately listed “as another cause of death.” This according to a nationwide study by the University of Washington, published in Lancet. That’s 35,000 people executed for things like Driving While Black. Or being mentally ill. Or walking in the street.

The basic point of American Autopsy is integrity. Baden repeats (far too often) how the science speaks for itself, and nothing should be allowed to prevent the truth coming out. Unfortunately, because the criminal justice system is corrupt in so very many ways, Baden keeps facing uncomfortable choices, either making enemies of the local police and prosecutors by announcing the true cause of death, or going with the flow and never crossing the bright blue line. His consistent choice is truth.

It doesn’t always succeed, either. White juries routinely allow police to get off scot-free, regardless of autopsy results. Judges may not want to reopen closed cases. Monetary settlements may force plaintiffs to cease their efforts. Plaintiffs often can’t deal with the costs involved in clearing a loved one’s name.

There is also an unnecessary amount of variety in authority. The difference between pathologists and forensic pathologists is quite simple. Pathologists look to medicine to track down the cause of death. Forensic pathologists look for unnatural causes, such as bullets, choking, broken bones and organs, and poisons. In other words, the homicides, accidents, suicides and overdoses that make up eight percent of deaths in the USA. A medical examiner has to be proficient in both disciplines. But both exist and provide greater or lesser service.

The medical examiner community is tiny. There are fewer than 500 of them (and Baden created their professional association so they could keep up with each other and developments). Everywhere he is invited, he finds he knows the local examiner, from school or work.

There is also the coroner community, which while called on to perform similar duties, is not necessarily equipped to do so. In many jurisdictions, he says, coroners are elected and need not have any medical training at all. It is a political position, which means it automatically starts out on the wrong foot. From there, corruption is just a baby step away, and incompetence is an ever-present potential stumbling block.

And finally, there is no federal force or structure regulating them. Coroners are elected at the county level. Baden was for many years the chief medical examiner for the City of New York. The police sometimes have their own medical examiners. It is not quite random chaos. But influencers influence. Pressure abounds. Justice does not get served. People die. Murderers go free.

Baden has an interesting style – of writing. He will describe the subject of a chapter, and then step back through history to describe a similar case, often in the same geographic area and situation. He will often have been at the center of the other case himself. He wraps up that story and returns to the case at hand, which readers will have forgotten about because the lookback was so engrossing.

Then every so often, he plunges into his own family trials and tribulations, recognizing his failures (his first marriage, and ironically, his most promising child’s death from drug addiction), and also rejoicing in his successes (all three of his surviving children have become medical doctors). His personal passion for his work, and how he got into it, shines through it all. He was always attracted to it, loves doing it still, can’t wait to do another, and is recognized for his superior proficiency at it.

His life is crazy hectic. He will get a call and catch a plane just hours later. He needs to act before the body is cremated, buried or even just washed. It could take him a day or a week. Nicole Simpson’s body was washed, preventing Baden from determining if any of the blood on her back was not hers. At the Attica prison riots, he had to go and find the bodies, which had been distributed to numerous funeral homes in the region. While the police claimed prisoners had slit the throats of their hostages, the autopsies showed no slit throats, but gunshot wounds from attacking police. It was “friendly” fire that killed them, not inmates, despite massive disinformation campaign from state police.

Or he might get a call to do an autopsy 20 years after the fact, as happened with Medgar Evers. The coffin was well sealed, the body well embalmed, and Baden was able to do a proper autopsy that was key to finally convicting his KKK assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, who was acquitted several times previously.

It all makes for a very fast read, filled with familiar stories in the news and in history, behind the scenes machinations, and one solid and competent voice fighting the good fight. It’s a behind-the-scenes look that readers would never even imagine.

David Wineberg… (meer)