Autopsy and State Violence: Implications in the Death Investigation of #George_Floyd
The killing of George Floyd by former officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25th, 2020 proved to be the catalyst for yet another set of contestations between people of color and the punitive structures of the U.S. state. One part of this contestation played out in Minneapolis, where protestors took to the streets to express their sadness, shock, and rage at Floyd’s murder. These protests took center stage in the consciousness of the world, and once again demanded a reckoning with the pervasiveness of state-sanctioned murder of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in the United States. These protests were soon followed by another contestation, one that garnered significantly less media attention, but was no less important: the struggle to properly assign a cause of Floyd’s death. While a criminal trial against Chauvin eventually proceeded, the process of determining the definitive cause of death required an additional autopsy due to doubts regarding the initial report by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner. This second autopsy was critical in the criminal trial against Chauvin and in his ultimate conviction.
In a system where coroners and medical examiners are empowered to make definitive statements as to the cause of one’s death, Floyd’s death reveals the gaps and structural weaknesses of these processes. How might we critically examine the assumed ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ of the autopsy process in cases where law enforcement structures play a significant role in the initial death investigation, especially in cases that are imbued with questions of police violence and racialized death?
To understand these gaps, assumptions, and the biases revealed in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, I define what the act of autopsy is and how law enforcement is served by it. I recount the events surrounding the autopsy of George Floyd and the differing causes of death that were declared. Turning to the ways coroners/medical examiners work in the service of law enforcement, I show how forensic work becomes intertwined with state power, demonstrating how ‘objectivity’ often protects said power. Finally, I contemplate the implications of these queries in regard to autopsy and the medical examiner/coroner position, given the increased attention in American society to BIPOC deaths at the hands of the state.
My hope is that this writing can spur conversations on how we approach the politics of death investigations, especially in a time where death is all-too widespread in the public consciousness, in both public health and state brutality contexts. This work touches upon questions of systemic racism, the disproportionate killing of Black Americans by the police, and the ways in which autopsy implicates both of these things within structures of state power. This work is not novel to me, as I have written and researched the fraught nature of autopsy in Indigenous communities for most of my academic career, particularly in the context of Minnesota (Smiles 2018, 2020). The aftermath of Floyd’s death and the ensuing controversy over the autopsy of his body thus was all too familiar and saddening to me. Additionally, the location of Floyd’s death is a neighborhood in South Minneapolis where I spent much of my childhood. For this, I feel compelled in this moment to address the myriad legal and medical structures that define the act of autopsy, to assess how it comes to bear on the dead, and to account for how it factored into the contestations over the documented cause of Floyd’s death.
▻https://agitatejournal.org/article/autopsy-and-state-violence-implications-in-the-death-investigation-o