The Coroner's Silence - by Terence Keel (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

For readers of His Name Is George Floyd and Under the Skin

A landmark investigation into forensic medicine that exposes the systematic concealment of state-sanctioned violence through death investigations

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they've sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd's and Sandra Bland's, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner's Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these cases: coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research--including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims' families--this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner's Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner's Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

Review Quotes

"Data and dignity denied. Distrust and disinformation amplified. Accountability missing. Keel's unflinching autopsy of the embodied realities of US deaths due to police and carceral violence exposes how long-standing systemic legal, medical, and carceral 'failures, ' in fact, successfully operate to entrench injustice. The antidotes? Transparency and transformative justice."
--Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health

"The Coroner's Silence is a stunning achievement. Terence Keel takes us inside the death investigation system and offers a harrowing picture of carcerality in the US. With the eye of a scientist and an artist, and with the help of those who have lost loved ones in the system, he shows us the horror of what happens in American jails and prisons. Reading this book changes how one sees this country and the people who bear the brunt of its contradictions. A tour de force and a must-read in these troubling times."
--Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

"Far beyond the police killings that make headlines, The Coroner's Silence powerfully lays bare a staggering yet concealed pattern of deaths in custody. Drawing on nearly a thousand autopsies, years of fieldwork, and deep collaboration with impacted communities, Terence Keel weaves searing personal narrative with incisive analysis to expose how the forensic system shields law enforcement from accountability by burying the truth. This courageous and essential book demands that we confront not only police violence but also the underlying inhumanity of a society that criminalizes and abandons those marginalized by profound inequality--and allows the state to kill them with impunity."
--Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and Torn Apart

"The Coroner's Silence reveals how death investigation itself helps conceal police violence. Terence Keel meticulously exposes a bureaucratic machinery in which science and medicine are weaponized to disguise in-custody deaths as natural or unavoidable. This searing exposé will enrage, grieve, and ultimately galvanize readers toward transforming the institutions that uphold such cruelty."
--Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

"For a country that leads the world in police killings, we want to believe that a trained, independent medical examiner will conduct an autopsy and help get at the truth. Not so. In this earnest yet sobering account, Terence Keel deftly navigates a complicated maze of history, procedure, bureaucracy, reports, testimony, misdirection, and obfuscation to get at the real truth: the coroner, constrained by structural racism, politics, and moral panics, is part of the problem. The Coroner's Silence is a big part of the solution."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

About the Author

Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science and co-editor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. Keel has received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.