I'm returning to the Suiter Files to share an article that should be of interest to readers who follow Baltimore crime and corruption. It's a story I wrote for The Appeal about corruption and pro-police bias in the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office.
If you read my book on the Freddie Gray case, you might recall a chapter called "The Autopsy." In it, I reveal how the medical examiner based her interpretation of Gray's cause of death on a long list of things that weren't scientific: what she was told happened by police and prosecutors, partial evidence (e.g., the statements of some officers and not others, zero witness statements, etc.), political pressure, and her own imagination. She wrote an unusually long opinion filled with open speculation. Her claim, that Gray was killed from being thrown forward in the van while it was moving, was used to justify a narrative that police were already pushing before she completed her investigation.
If you haven't read my book yet, it's available for purchase where books are sold and in most libraries, in hard copy, electronic, and audio formats.
I also mentioned, in the autopsy chapter, that the chief medical examiner at the time of Gray's death, David Fowler, had been controversial in 2021, when he testified for the Minneapolis police officer that killed George Floyd. He claimed on the stand that Floyd might have been killed by a heart condition, car intoxicants... anything but police force. After a public outcry, including a letter signed by medical examiners around the country, the Maryland attorney general's office promised an investigation, releasing a database of 1,313 deaths in police custody in Maryland during and after Fowler's leadership.
Over the next few years, I watched as this investigation seemed to go nowhere. A year after first announcing the investigation, the AG's office said that it would focus on about 100 cases for review. Based on everything I knew and saw in the database, there had to be more than 100 problematic cases that deserved another review.
While working on my book, i had gotten to know some people at Campaign Zero, a nonprofit founded by Deray McKesson and some others, who were seeking to end "excited delirium," a bogus cause of death finding medical examiners use to blame police killings on the victims. (My Appeal story explains more about this finding.)
I was interested in looking at patterns under Fowler of how excited delirium worked. Freddie Gray's death was never associated with excited delirium in public. But I found, in reviewing officers' statements, that there was an initial effort to suggest that his death was caused by the fictional finding. The officers were working on other stories too, including that Gray caused his own death and that there was an accident. Police and prosecutors ended up mostly settling on blaming the driver.
Campaign Zero provided invaluable assistance by requesting dozens of autopsy reports and police files. These are prohibitively expensive (at $100 per autopsy report), which is one way the ME's office has been able to avoid accountability for so long.
This year, I finally had the time for the in-depth investigation I'd always wanted to do, which felt especially necessary as the AG's office wasn't offering anything to the public from its own investigation, three years in. I ordered more autopsy and police reports as my investigation led me in different directions. I immersed myself in the world of forensic science bias, and I landed a couple of key interviews with people close to the ME's office. I found lots of shocking and disturbing patterns in how deaths caused by police were evaluated and covered up by MEs.
I'm very proud of this story, but it's unlikely to get the kind of attention it should in Baltimore or Maryland because of the gatekeeping by the local press and particular antagonism towards very independent reporters—especially women, like me, that are also media critics. That antagonism is a part of why I shifted away from reporting about Baltimore. My last big Baltimore investigative story, on Thiru Vignarajah and sexual harassment, had a big impact but was an outrageously hard struggle to get published. Given that he was running for office and the importance of that story, it shouldn't have been that hard. I began to feel set up to fail as a local reporter. Even my book, with all of its brand new evidence in the city's most famous case, couldn't get the attention of the city's mainstream news outlets.
As with my book, I found more luck with a national outlet for my story on Fowler's office. The Appeal also published my original Freddie Gray investigation, which laid the foundation for my book. Anyway, thank you for checking this new story out.... and, if you are interested, a few other articles below:
"The Big Problem with Marilyn Mosby's Innocence Campaign," in Slate, from May. I wrote about the federal indictment against Mosby in an earlier blog post here. This story covers some of the same ground while looking at whether Mosby had a point that she was being politically targeted by Leo Wise. As with most Baltimore crimial justice stories, there are no heroes.
“A Twitter controversy over Covid-19 led to a culture of distrust and suppression within ACT UP,” in Disability Visibility. The oddest, most surprising story I've ever reported. When you think of ACT UP, you probably think of the historic organization that gave voice to sick, dying, angry, and loud people. These days, being like that will get you stigmatized and even suspended from the flagship New York branch.
Annoyingly, I became part of the story, which I reported on in a follow-up story on my Substack. ACT UP NY is the story that never ends.
“Perfect Storm of Criminalization: Analyzing Mask Bans,” in The Sick Times. The Sick Times is a new outlet that was established with major grant funding to cover the Long Covid epidemic, and it's already having a huge impact. My article provides a legal and political analysis into how we got from laws mandating masks to laws criminalizing masks in a few years. It includes the most comprehensive list of mask bans and proposed bans per state ever published.
“When Does Concern About Presidential Fitness Become Media Ableism?” in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. As Biden dropped out of the presidential campaign, I looked at how media outlets were talking about Biden and Trump’s fitness for office and their particularly bizarre fetishization of presidential strength. There are reasonable questions to ask about age and ability, and then there’s ableism that makes it harder for disabled people to seek office.
I am also still writing about criminal justice and disability on Substack.
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