An audit of autopsies in Maryland has uncovered at least 36 deaths in police custody that should have been considered homicides, state officials announced Thursday.
The review of 87 in-custody death cases found that medical examiners under Dr. David Fowler — the state's chief medical examiner from 2002 to 2019, who testified for the defense at Derek Chauvin's murder trial — displayed racial and pro-police bias. They were "especially unlikely to classify a death as a homicide if the decedent was Black, or if they died after being restrained by police," Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said at a news conference.
"These findings have profound implications across our justice system," Brown said. "They speak to systemic issues rather than individual conduct."
What the review found
Three-person panels of independent reviewers evaluated each autopsy. In 36 cases they unanimously concluded the deaths should have been classified as homicides; in five more, two of the three reviewers reached that conclusion.
Nearly half of the reviewed cases cited "excited delirium" as a cause of death — a diagnosis that has been widely debunked by medical experts in recent years and, critics say, was often used to justify excessive force. The report recommended medical examiners stop using the term altogether.
Two high-profile deaths are among the 41 cases highlighted: Anton Black, an unarmed 19-year-old who died in 2018 after Maryland Eastern Shore police pinned him down for more than six minutes, and Tyrone West, who died in 2013 after a traffic stop. Fowler had ruled Black's death an accident and West's death natural causes. Both are now on the list of cases that should have been ruled homicides.
Why this came up
The audit was prompted by widespread concerns about Fowler's work. In 2021, he testified for the defense in Minneapolis, attributing George Floyd's death to a sudden heart rhythm disturbance as a result of his heart disease — a theory that did little to persuade the jury, which convicted Chauvin of murder and manslaughter.
After that trial, more than 400 medical experts signed a letter to Maryland's attorney general asserting that Fowler's testimony "deviated way outside the bounds of accepted forensic practice," and calling for an investigation into whether his office's in-custody death determinations exhibited bias.
What happens next
Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said he signed an executive order directing Brown to review the 41 cases and determine whether any should be reopened for investigation. Moore also created a statewide task force to study deaths of people restrained in custody and directed the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to develop standardized procedures for investigating restraint-related deaths.
Officials stressed that the findings do not suggest intentional or malicious conduct, and that a homicide classification means someone died because of another person's action — not necessarily that the officers involved should be prosecuted.
The review builds on a 2023 settlement that reformed the state's autopsy process for people killed in police custody.