CORONER REPORTS PROJECT

Death under the U.S. Medical Examiner/Coroner System

This project investigates the history and current practices of the United States medical examiner/coroner system. The work reveals how the entanglement of law enforcement, forensic pathology, and ethical nihilism produce forms of state violence and biomedical racism that target BIPOC communities who are killed while in police custody in the streets and in carceral institutions throughout the United States. The collaborative dimension of this work involves a public facing data science project done in partnership with Dignity and Power Now,

Dr. Nick Shapiro’s (UCLA) Carceral Ecologies Lab, Dr. Lauren Brown's (SDSU) Linked Fate Data Collective , Professor of Law Aziza Ahmed (UC Irvine School of Law), and my own BioCritical Studies Lab. This collaboration has produced several forthcoming reports and also serves as the basis for my single-authored book, Society after Nihilism: The Medicolegal Erasure of Accountability at the end of American Life.