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

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.