State officials in Maryland recently announced that they’d be reforming the process for autopsies on people killed in law enforcement custody as part of a settlement with the family of Anton Black, a Black teenager who was killed by white police officers in 2018.
Approved on Wednesday by the Maryland Board of Public Works, a group composed of the treasurer, comptroller and governor, the settlement includes an agreement that the state will have to explicitly detail how medical examiners perform autopsies of people who died in custody, according to a news release by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland.
Under the new policy, the offices will need to adhere to the guidelines of the National Association of Medical Examiners when it pertains to all deaths that happen in restraint under police custody.
Per the National Association of Medical Examiners, when a person wouldn’t have died “but for” the actions of another, then it would be ruled a homicide.
Under the settlement, the influence of law enforcement is also barred, with medical examiners being ordered to approach each case objectively and separate any investigative information from the examination. All sources of where the information was retrieved from and whether any law enforcement was involved during the process of the autopsy need to be documented.
Medical examiners will also be required to disclose the rights of families to review the autopsy report and ask for any corrections.
“This settlement is an excellent first step, but as we engage in this new process community members must stay vigilant and engaged to make sure it’s effective. The best frontline approach to eliminating harm is increasing accountability within,” said the founder of the Coalition for Justice for Anton Black, Richard Potter, per the news release. “What is needed is a sense of shared ownership that can only come through trust and mutual accountability, with police confronting their own biases about mental illness, committing to de-escalation, and truly serving a diverse community.”
📢BIG NEWS‼️ Today, family members and the Coalition for Justice for Anton Black announced final resolution of their federal court litigation following the brutal, unconstitutional killing of Anton Black.https://t.co/wWUMw0JkZ7
— ACLU of Maryland (@ACLU_MD) November 8, 2023
The settlement was a part of the three-year legal battle over the death of 19-year-old Anton Black. In 2018, Black died when white police officers chased and used a taser on him. Police body-camera footage showed that he was handcuffed and had his legs shackled by three officers and a white civilian as they proceeded to hold him down for six minutes. As they refused to let go, Black died from positional asphyxiation.
In December 2020, his family filed a lawsuit to declare his murder as discrimatory and unconstitutional and to hold state officials accountable for covering up for the police. Black’s autopsy was made public four months later and listed his cause of death as an accident, blaming heart abnormalities and removing any responsibility from the police officers’ part in the death.
“This hard-fought settlement is about ensuring that the Maryland Office of the Medical Examiner tells the truth about what happens when people, and particularly Black people, are killed by police or corrections officials,” said senior staff attorney of the ACLU of Maryland, Sonia Kumar, per a statement. “We hope this settlement will make a real, positive impact, but it is truly just the beginning of the reckoning needed to address decades of misrepresentations so we can bring justice to families still waiting for the government to tell the truth.”
