Professor Miriam Gohara Contributes to Report on U.S. Deaths in Custody
A new report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examines the handling of deaths in custody in the United States and says that the system that investigates those deaths needs comprehensive reform.
In-custody deaths include those that occur at any point from the time of a first encounter with law enforcement through pretrial processing and incarceration, to the point of release from prison, jail, or other detention, according to the report.
Clinical Professor of Law Miriam Gohara served for the past 18 months on the committee that released the report, titled “Strengthening the U.S. Medicolegal Death Investigation System: Lessons from Death in Custody.”
“The Death in Custody report’s findings and recommendations have crucial implications for both the justice and public health systems in the United States,” Gohara said. “It was an honor to serve on the interdisciplinary committee of experts in both fields as well as in forensic medicine and to hear from stakeholders and people whose loved ones died in custody before reaching our conclusions.”
Among its findings, the report says that the U.S. medicolegal death investigation (MLDI) system is “fragmented and lacks the resources, uniformity, enforceable standards, data, and incentives needed to produce consistent cause- and manner-of-death determinations for individuals who die while in custody,” according to an Oct. 30 announcement releasing the report.
The study considered the number and distribution of deaths in custody in the U.S., the measures forensic pathologists should follow to assess cause of death, approaches to improve the handing of deaths in custody, and other issues that arise with medical death investigations more generally.
The Committee on Advancing the Field of Forensic Pathology: Lessons Learned from Death-in-Custody Investigations that produced the report was co-chaired by Judge Raymond Lohier of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and Dr. John A. Rich of the RUSH University Medical Center.
The report recommends actions that Congress, state governments, and others should take to strengthen the nation’s MLDI system, according to the National Academies.
Among its recommendations are a call for Congress to require states to collect and report data on all in-custody deaths, direct the National Center for Health Statistics to update the U.S. Standard Certificate of Death, and authorize and appropriate funding to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to reimburse state and local governments for the cost of autopsies performed on those who have died in custody.
The report also says that states should require licensure of all medicolegal death investigators and have them meet continuing education requirements. It found that comprehensive data on deaths in custody are not available, and the available data can be unreliable.
“Incomplete or inaccurate data on the cause and circumstances of a death in custody hinder society’s ability to protect the health and safety of people who are incarcerated and correctional staff, and to hold accountable those who cause the unnatural deaths of people in custody,” the announcement of the report said.
At Yale Law School, Miriam Gohara teaches and writes about capital and noncapital sentencing, incarceration, and the historical and social forces implicated in culpability and punishment. She founded the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, which represents clients in sentencing and postconviction cases. Before joining the Law School faculty, she spent 16 years representing death-sentenced clients in postconviction litigation, first as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and then as a specially designated federal public defender with the Federal Capital Habeas Project.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine work together to provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation and conduct other activities to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions.
