American Autopsy: One Medical Examiner's Decades-Long Fight for Racial Justice in a Broken Legal System

by Michael M. Baden MD, Peter Neufeld (Afterword)

Overview

A revealing history of covering up the true causes of deaths of BIPOC in custody—from the forensic pathologist whose work changed the course of the George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown cases

Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in US history, from the government’s 1976 re-investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the 2014 death of Michael Brown, whose case sparked the initial Ferguson protests that grew into the Black Lives Matter movement.

The playbook hasn’t changed since 1979, when Dr. Baden was demoted from his job as New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner after ruling that the death of a Black man in police custody was a homicide.

So in 2020 when the Floyd family, wary of the same system that oversaw George Floyd’s death, needed a second opinion—Dr. Baden is who they called.

In these pages, Dr. Baden chronicles his six decades on the front lines of the fight for accountability within the legal system—including the long history of medical examiners of using a controversial syndrome called excited delirium (a term that shows up in the pathology report for George Floyd) to explain away the deaths of BIPOC restrained by police.

In the process, he brings to life the political issues that go on in the wake of often unrecorded fatal police encounters and the standoff between law enforcement and those they are sworn to protect.

Full of behind-the-scenes drama and surprising revelations, American Autopsy is an invigorating—and enraging—read that is both timely and crucial for this turning point in our nation’s history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637740460
Publisher:	BenBella Books, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	76,493
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dr. Michael Baden is a physician, former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and former Chief Forensic Pathologist for the New York State Police and has held professorial teaching appointments at Albert Einstein Medical School, Albany Medical College, New York University Medical School, New York Law School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was Chairman of the Forensic Pathology Panel of the U.S. Congress Select Committee on Assassinations. Dr. Baden has been consulted as an expert in the investigations of the deaths of many government officials, celebrities, and other high-profile individuals, in many countries around the world. Dr. Baden was the host of HBO's Autopsy series for 12 years, has written two non-fiction books on forensic science: Unnatural Death, Confessions of a Medical Examiner and Dead Reckoning, the New Science of Catching Killers, and is co-author, with his wife, attorney Linda Kenney Baden, of two forensic thrillers, Remains Silent and Skeleton Justice. He is the forensic science contributor for FOX National News and is a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Table of Contents

Prologue Medical Examiner on the Road 1

1 Moonlighting 9

2 The Needle and the Damage Done 17

3 The Confession 31

4 Psychosis with Exhaustion 45

5 Attica, New York 61

6 Pathology Rules 77

7 Under Fire 87

8 The Lawsuit 101

9 Justice for Settles 119

10 A New Beginning 133

11 The Ghosts of Mississippi 143

12 O.J. 163

13 If It Doesn't Fit… 181

14 Justice Delayed 197

15 Positional Asphyxia 209

16 Sickle Cell Trait 219

17 Excited Delirium 231

18 Summer of Death 243

19 The More Things Change 263

Epilogue 273

Afterword 289

Acknowledgments 301

Index 303

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this book, Dr. Michael Baden exposes that the truth is always the objective no matter how much the powers that be try to ignore it. His autopsies in some of the most high-profile cases in the history of America spoke truth to power and exposed the implicit bias and racism as had never been done before in such a manner.”
—Ben Crump, civil rights attorney
 
“Dr. Michael Baden is the person you call for hard truths, and he spares no one in his story of six decades as a medical examiner. A powerful narrative on its own, American Autopsy acts as a mirror in America’s ongoing reform of its justice system. There isn’t a more important book in 2023.”
—Kevin Maurer, New York Times bestselling author of No Easy Day and American Radical
 
“American Autopsy is the revealing history of a medical examiner’s journey in the fight for social justice. Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in US history . . . A powerful narrative, American Autopsy helps explain the deep divisions in our nation related to race, class, policing, and the criminal justice system.”
—Chris Wallace, broadcast journalist
 
“Dr. Michael Baden, a leader and soldier in the social and justice movement, in writing this personal, riveting, moving book, takes the reader for a journey into the world of a forensic pathologist seeking justice. I could not put this book down once I started reading.”
—Ted Williams, FOX News contributor and criminal and civil attorney
 
“From the autopsy of slain Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers to the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner to the ‘Trial of the Century’ involving O.J. Simpson, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden has done it all. And now he shares the details of his incredible career in American Autopsy.”
—Jerry Mitchell, founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
 
“A riveting read by Dr. Michael Baden documenting his quest to achieve social justice through forensic pathology.”
—Kathy Reichs, author of the Temperance “Bones” Brennan series