An ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine intends to conduct a study on the handling of deaths in custody (detained, arrested, en route to incarceration, or incarcerated in state or local facilities or a boot camp prison) by the medicolegal death investigation system in the United States and study related concerns with medical death investigations more generally. The study will consider:
(1) the number of deaths while in custody throughout the criminal justice process and how those deaths are investigated, diagnosed, recorded, reported and made transparent;
(2) the distribution of diagnoses for deaths that occur in custody (cause and manner of death) and the scientific bases for attributing such diagnoses to those deaths;
(3) measures (and limitations thereof) that forensic pathologists should follow to conduct independent assessments of cause of death generally and in particular for deaths in custody;
(4) the proper range of attributions for cause and manner of death that should be made in a medicolegal death investigation and the scientific bases and associated evidence needed to justify a diagnosis related to any death in general and, in particular, to deaths in custody;
(5) mitigation strategies to be used to protect forensic pathologists from factors that may bias their diagnosis;
(6) an assessment of the dual role played by the medicolegal death investigation system as fact finders of manner of death for public health as opposed to for the criminal justice system; and
(7) quality standards and regulations needed for improvement.
The committee will produce a consensus report with findings and recommendations.