Book Review Champion Magazine: Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It

Roger A. Mitchell, Jr., M.D. and J. D. Aronson, PhD

Johns Hopkins University Press

Review by Matthew T. Mangino

             The criminal justice system is facing a public health emergency – thousands of people die each year while in custody of U.S. law enforcement, concludes Roger A. Mitchell, Jr., M.D. and J. D. Aronson, PhD in their book “Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It.”

            Mitchell and Aronson take a deep dive into the history of deaths while in custody. From lynchings in the late 19th and early 20th century to the 1951 report by the Civil Rights Congress “We Charge Genocide” where it was argued that there exists a “seamless transition from slavery to lynching to Jim Crow to police brutality.”

            Why did lynching take off during and after Reconstruction? The end of slavery brought an end to the value of black lives. When black men and women were chattel they had value to slave owners. After slavery, black persons had no value.

            The Association of Southern Women for Protection of Lynching and the NAACP established a definition for lynching (1) a body; (2) an illegal killing; (3) killing by a group and (4) justification of the extrajudicial killing under the banner of justice.

            Three incidents in 1999 shaped co-author Roger Mitchell’s realization that police brutality was a public health issue. In February 1999 Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man, in the Bronx, was shot 41 times by four undercover NYPD police officers.

            In April of 1999, Earl Fasion was picked up as a suspect in the killing of a New Jersey police officer. Fasion was beaten by police while handcuffed and sprayed directly in the face with pepper spray. Suffering from asthma, his breathing became strained, and he died in police custody.

            The same year “Stolen Lives” was released as an effort to humanize the victims of police brutality in custody.

            Mitchell, a medical student, was the first to write about police brutality as a public health issue for the Student National Medical Association.

            Aronson and Mitchell wrote about Reuter’s work examining 7,571 deaths of incarcerated people between 2008 and 2019 including 4,998 individuals who had not yet been convicted of a crime. Reuters found a confluence of factors that can turn a short jail stay into a death sentence -- including a dysfunctional bail system, inadequate health care including mental health treatment.  

The authors did not ignore the major incidents of excessive force by police. In 1991, a video of Rodney King, an African American motorist, being brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police officers sparking a national outrage over police brutality. After the officers were acquitted at trial, L.A. erupted into a massive riot.

In 2014, Eric Garner, an African American man, was killed by New York City police after being placed in a banned chokehold while arresting him for selling untaxed cigarettes. Garner repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe,” before dying. Garner’s homicide fueled the Black Lives Matter movement.

George Floyd, also an African American, was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020, when officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for over nine minutes during an arrest, for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. The killing sparking global protests with a familiar reframe -- his dying words, "I can't breathe."

Aronson and Mitchell also offered a glimpse into a little known, but principled stand by a well-known person who challenged one of America’s most influential institutions. Dr. Bennett Omalu took on the NFL over Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE. His efforts were memorialized in the major motion picture, “Concussion.”

After exposing the NFL’s secret, Omalu landed at the San Joaquin County Sheriff-Corners Office in California. Omalu lead a crusade, with help of one of the co-authors Mitchell, to expose the dangerously inadequate coroner system in the United States.

Aronson and Mitchell concluded by making a few common-sense suggestions for dealing with deaths in custody -- none more important than the collection of data. The Center for Disease Control is responsible for capturing, compiling, and reporting the national mortality rate. 

The lack of data on deaths in custody begs the question, why haven’t the CDC and related agencies taken the lead on ensuring that accurate data are collected on deaths in custody?

(Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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Fourth Circuit: Police need warrant to use tracking device that mimics cellphone tower

Police wanting to use a device mimicking a cellphone tower to locate people must first get a warrant, a Fourth Circuit panel ruled, reported Courthouse News Service.

Kerron Andrews was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department in May 2014, after the police secured a court order allowing them to use a cell-site simulator to obtain his real-time location information. Andrews’ cellphone provider had allowed the police to determine his location within a few blocks, before the police used a simulator to determine he was in a specific townhouse.

Andrews told the Fourth Circuit panel this past January that the court order did not satisfy the Fourth Circuit’s warrant requirement. The panel disagreed Thursday, while recognizing that cellphones pose a unique threat to individual privacy.

The precision of the technology used by the police is invasive, U.S. Circuit Judge Nicole Berner wrote for the majority, and people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a private home. The Joe Biden appointee was joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Toby Heytens, also a Biden appointee.

“This technology is akin to sense-enhancing technology that allows the government to peer into a private home, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly held requires a warrant,” she wrote. The cell-site simulator effectively “cracked open the front door” of the property to reveal Andrews, she said.

“Despite the ubiquity of cell-site simulators, no federal court of appeals has squarely addressed whether law enforcement’s use of this technology for realtime tracking of a cellphone constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment,” she wrote. “Today, we hold that it does.”

Andrews had a reasonable expectation that his phone wouldn’t be used as a real-time tracking device by law enforcement, the panel found, and the use of the cell-site simulator constitutes a search as defined in the Fourth Amendment. The judges did not decide if the pen register order secured by the cops satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Despite this, Andrews’ civil suit against the police department and detectives can’t proceed, because the officers are protected by qualified immunity, the panel found, upholding a lower court’s judgment in favor of the police department and its detectives.

Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. concurred with the judgment, adding in a short opinion that he feels the panel should have first determined if Andrews’ constitutional rights had been violated and evaluated whether the pen register order was a valid warrant.

The police sought to arrest Andrews — who had previously worked with them as an informant — on charges of triple attempted murder after a shooting during a drug deal. The prosecution dropped the case against him after a Maryland court found officers should have first secured a warrant to use the simulator. He had spent nearly two years in pretrial detention, and later sued the department and two detectives claiming that they violated the Fourth and 14th Amendments by using the simulator.

“We are pleased that today’s ruling agreed that using privacy-invading technology—here, a device that enables law enforcement to see through walls—requires a valid search warrant,” Mike Pichini, attorney for Andrews, told Courthouse News. “Although disappointed with the overall result, we celebrate that our Constitution constrains law enforcement’s warrantless privacy invasions, especially when such invasions breach residential walls. We, the people, must be vigilant against government warrantless use of ever-evolving technology to erode our fundamental right to privacy.”

The Baltimore Police Department and detectives had argued his constitutional rights were not violated, and that their actions were reasonable as they had a warrant for his arrest and a court order allowing them to use a cellular tracking device that was functionally equivalent to a warrant. The court order did not satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, Andrews argued.

The case had appeared before the Fourth Circuit before, when the panel expressed concerns the order did not specifically authorize a cell-site simulator and that the device may have searched devices other than Andrews’. The court remanded the case, directing the lower court to conduct more fact-finding.

In May 2025, the police defendants secured summary judgment, with U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher concluding the search required a warrant but that the order the police secured was sufficient and effectively acted as a warrant. Andrews’ Fourth Amendment rights were not violated, she ruled.

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Do you know about the Federal Office of Remigration? If not read this now

Did you know that the U.S. government has an agency called the “Office of Remigration”? In case you’re unfamiliar with the term “remigration,” it’s typically used by white nationalists to describe the mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, done in the quest to ethnically cleanse “Western” countries. It’s mostly a European term, but Trump himself employed the phrase “reverse migration” last year, mainstreaming “remigration” on the American right—and true to its name, the office now helps facilitate mass removals in some very dark and sordid ways, reported The New Republic.

So let’s lay down a marker: If Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate, they should make it their business next year to ensure that this agency faces truly withering scrutiny. As many Americans as possible should know what their government is doing in their name.

The Office of Remigration, after all, has mostly managed to remain a very low-profile, poorly understood affair. It’s housed inside the State Department, where its roughly 15 employees toil in anonymity inside a vast bureaucracy, unnoticed by just about all Americans.

But a blockbuster Washington Post investigation just flushed the Office of Remigration’s activities out into the light. Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.

It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.

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Mississippi police make arrests involving black woman hanging from a tree

Police in Mississippi have arrested a second man in the death of a Black woman found hanging from a tree and have issued an arrest warrant for a third suspect, reported The Associated Press.

Jackson police said late Tuesday that they arrested 25-year-old Earnest Lloyd Jr. in the death of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, whose body was found hanging behind an abandoned home in the city on Aug. 3.

Like Fortune and the first man arrested, 51-year-old Jarques Ratliff, Lloyd is Black. He appeared at a brief hearing Wednesday, where he was denied bond.

According to local TV station WLBT, investigators said witnesses directed them to Lloyd, who had allegedly had a physical altercation with Fortune days or minutes before she was killed. Police contend that Lloyd hanged Fortune with a black cable cord, and three co-defendants are also suspected of being involved in her death, the station reported.

Police and the court clerk said Wednesday that they didn’t know if Lloyd has a lawyer.

Fortune’s mother Christy Spivey, who attended the hearing, said afterward that she was ecstatic to see arrests made in her daughter’s death. She said neither she nor several of her daughter’s friends knew Lloyd, and she cautioned that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

“My family is not the only family that this is affecting,” Spivey said of the defendants’ families. “I feel for them as well. The only difference is that mine can never come back.”

“I’ll never truly have peace,” she said.

Ratliff was arrested in September on murder charges. He pleaded not guilty and remains jailed without bond. His lawyer, Toney Baldwin, hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment.

Police said in a statement that they issued an arrest warrant for a third suspect, but gave no details about that person’s identity or alleged link to Fortune’s death. They also said they expect to issue additional warrants.

After Ratliff’s arrest, Jackson’s police chief, RaShall Brackney, said Ratliff had an “association” with Fortune, but she didn’t elaborate.

Although police haven’t suggested a possible motive for the killing, the case has attracted widespread attention because the manner of death recalled lynchings in the Southern state.

A Kentucky native, Fortune had four children and had been living in Jackson for about a decade, relatives said.

Spivey previously said her daughter struggled with homelessness in recent years, and that she wasn’t sure where her daughter was living at the time of her death. She said that before her death, her daughter had talked about starting a cleaning business and was trying to get her life in order.

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Texas executes man for triple murder, co-defendant was executed last week

 The 28th Execution of 2026

Ker’Sean Ramey was executed in Texas on September 23, 2026 for a triple killing committed during an attempted robbery at a rural home, one week after the other man convicted in the case was put to death, reported The Associated Press.

Ramey, 41, was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. CDT following a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was the sixth person executed this year in Texas, with three more lethal injections scheduled in the state over the next two months.

In the execution chamber, a prison chaplain rested his left hand on Ramey’s right shoulder and offered a brief prayer before the warden asked the prisoner if he had any last words. Ramey praised God and thanked friends, family and fellow death row inmates he called his brothers.

“To the brothers on Texas death row that grew up with me, that poured into me and showed what it means to be a man, because I came in young, and didn’t understand what manhood was ... to you brothers ... I greatly appreciate you,” he said just before the injection got underway.

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began flowing, Ramey took a deep breath, sputtered and began snoring. After 10 loud snores and two that were nearly inaudible, all movement ceased.

A physician pronounced Ramey dead 14 minutes after the injection began. Ramey’s body was then covered with a white sheet.

A jury had convicted Ramey of capital murder and sentenced him to death for the August 2005 shootings of Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, at the home they shared in Edna, a small rural city some 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Houston.

Ramey and LeJames Norman believed there was cocaine in the house and hoped to steal it, according to court records. The men entered the home with guns, found no drugs and fatally shot the three residents, who lived just across the street from Norman, the records show.

Norman was executed on Sept. 16 at the Huntsville prison, where all Texas executions are carried out.

Including Ramey’s execution, a total of 28 inmates have been put to death around several U.S. states this year. Florida leads those states with 15 executions so far in 2026, by far the nation’s busiest death chamber.

Hours before Wednesday’s execution, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Ramey’s final appeal.

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His attorneys argued that jurors had never heard that Ramey suffered physical abuse as a child and grew up in poverty. State prosecutors told the court the appeal was “meritless” and said the evidence showed Ramey exhibited “an escalating pattern of criminal behavior.”

Norman was arrested about five months after the killings while seeking to re-enter the U.S. from Mexico, where he had fled. He testified at Ramey’s trial in January 2007 that both men shot the victims. Ramey’s attorneys blamed the shootings on Norman.

Ramey’s former girlfriend testified that she was with Ramey when he threw two handguns into a lake after the killings, and that he later described his involvement to her in detail.

Lopez was shot four times, including in the back of the head; Peacock was shot twice in the head; and Roberts was shot five times in the chest, neck and head.

Norman was sentenced to death in December 2008 after pleading guilty to capital murder.

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The Clancy Effect: Richard Allen convicted Delphi killer claims psychosis defense

An attorney for a man serving 130 years in prison for killing two teen girls in Indiana said police were so determined to find him guilty they used confessions gathered while he suffered from psychosis and withheld from trial a witness sketch that looked nothing like him, reported The Associated Press.

Jurors convicted Richard Allen of murder in 2024 in the deaths of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, known as Abby and Libby. The case in the tiny town of Delphi went unsolved for more than five years before Allen was arrested, becoming a magnet for true-crime enthusiasts.

After Allen told investigators he had been on the trail near where the girls died, authorities found any way they could to convict him and make sure no evidence surfaced that any other man was on that walkway, attorney Mark Leeman told a three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals on Monday.

“We live in a world where one or two things happen here,” Leeman said. “A pharmacy tech with no criminal history goes out for a walk to watch a stock ticker and look at fish and decides to gruesomely murder two girls. Or, we live in a world where the police through confirmation bias failed to find the right guy.”

Judges have plenty of questions about the trial’s fairness

The three judges handling the appeal questioned why the trial judge didn’t allow the defense to call an expert to testify that it looked like the girls were killed by unknown participants in a pagan ritual. They also asked why a police sketch of someone seen near the trail was omitted from trial, noting that the sketch looked nothing like Allen.

The panel also questioned why a defense expert wasn’t allowed to question whether marks on an unfired bullet can be traced to a specific gun, as prosecutors had asserted. And given that videos of Allen’s odd behavior in prison were shown to jurors, the appeals judges wanted to know why the trial judge did not allow the audio to be played as well, audio in which Allen claimed to be a king and that he had started World War III.

But the judges also asked the state several times if the decisions were harmless and whether the jury would have convicted Allen anyway even if the trial decisions being weighed had gone his way.

Indiana Deputy Attorney General Ellen Meilaender said Allen provided the strongest evidence himself when he told police before he was arrested that he was on the trail, but said he didn’t see the girls.

“Allen denied seeing Abby and Libby there, even though the timeline evidence indisputably shows he must have done so, which was consciousness of guilt,” Meilaender said.

The judges will rule at a later date.

Crime scene had plenty of strange evidence

The girls’ bodies were found down a steep hill from an abandoned railroad trestle on a hiking trail just outside of Delphi on Feb. 13, 2017. The eighth graders were dropped off and never made it to their pickup point.

The teens’ throats were cut, and a few branches were scattered over their bodies. One was found nude while the other was wearing the first victim’s clothes. There was no evidence they had been sexually assaulted.

One of the girls took a brief video of a suspicious man nearby saying, “Down the hill.”

Prosecutors said Allen was armed with a gun and forced the girls off the hiking trail. They said he confessed to planning to rape them before a passing van made him change his mind and kill them. An expert testified an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s handgun.

Defense lawyers at his trial said no witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen near the trail the afternoon the girls went missing. They also said no fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the murder scene. They wanted to call an expert to dispute that guns can mark bullets in unique ways, but weren’t allowed.

Allen’s lawyers say isolation led to mental breakdown and false confessions

Allen was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. He denied killing the girls for months, but his attorneys said mental stress from isolation led to a steep psychological decline. Eventually, his mental state became so bad he convinced himself he killed the girls and confessed several times, his lawyers said.

Prosecutors said the statements coincided with Allen seeing evidence in the case including the conditions of the teens’ bodies.

Expert testimony of possible pagan ritual also excluded

Allen’s trial attorneys wanted to put an expert witness on the stand to testify the killings appeared to be a ritual sacrifice by people who worshipped Odin, the king of the gods in Norse mythology.

The expert was expected to say the positioning of the bodies, the branches on the remains, the outdoor location of the crime and knife wounds to the victims all were indications of pagan rituals.

Prosecutors said the expert had limited examples and that defense lawyers shouldn’t be able to present just any theory without evidence to back it up. They said it would have turned the trial into a sideshow.

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Judge calls bite marks 'junk science' grants man new trial for 1985 slaying

Charles McCrory was convicted and sentenced to life in an Alabama prison for the May 1985 slaying of his wife, Julie Bonds McCrory. The case rested predominately on two small marks on Julie’s arm, which the state and its expert said were bite marks that Charles McCrory made in a rageful, brutal killing, reported AL.com

Today, the technique of matching bite marks to a person’s teeth is considered junk science. And the dentist who long ago testified against him has recanted, saying he can’t even be sure the mark was made by teeth at all — much less McCrory’s teeth.

“The bitemark evidence clearly prejudiced the outcome of McCrory’s trial, especially in light of the other evidence presented at trial,” wrote Chief U.S. District Judge Austin Huffaker Jr. in his Monday order.

“The non-bitemark evidence from which the jury could convict McCrory was thin.”

Huffaker’s order said the Alabama Attorney General’s Office has 180 days to begin a new trial for McCrory or release him from prison.

The state did not respond to a request for comment on Monday afternoon. The office could appeal the decision.

McCrory, a 26-year-old tech worker and volunteer paramedic, was always the main suspect in his wife’s murder. There was no DNA implicating McCrory, no confessions or clear motive. No blood was ever found on his clothes or in his apartment.

But Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic dentist in Florida who matched a victim’s wounds to Ted Bundy’s crooked teeth in Bundy’s 1979 trial, testified at McCroy’s trial that the two small marks on Julie’s arm matched McCrory’s teeth.

That testimony was the sole physical evidence against McCrory, and Huffaker said it “resulted in a fundamentally unfair trial.”

The judge said on Monday that the state court’s decision in 2022, which denied McCrory’s request for a new trial, was “both an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law and was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts.”

McCrory lived in a small apartment down the street from his wife and toddler son in Andalusia, in Covington County. He and Julie McCrory, then 24, were in the middle of a divorce. But McCrory said he was at the family home on the night of May 30, 1985. The two went to couple’s therapy, spent time with their son, and had sex before McCrory went back to his apartment, he said. The two were often together, and Julie’s date book showed the possibility of her husband moving back in.

McCrory heard about the murder the next morning, when his paramedic radio signaled a call for help at his wife’s home and he responded to the scene.

Julie was found laying in the front doorway of her home. She had been severely beaten with five “chop” wounds to her head, 11 puncture wounds to her chest, fractures of her jaw bones, various bruises and two small marks on the back of her upper right arm.

No one ever confirmed what made the puncture marks that riddled her body.

At trial in October 1985, the case hinged on circumstantial evidence like McCrory’s behavior and disputed witness statements as to cars at the family home. The two small marks that Souviron said were made by McCrory’s upper teeth were the only physical evidence.

The lack of physical evidence didn’t matter. McCrory was convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life.

But, in the years after the conviction, bite mark evidence was questioned. By 2022, national groups called the technique “junk science” and said bite mark analysis isn’t supported by data.

And in 2019, Souviron took back his testimony.

“I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” he said in an affidavit. He added that he “would not” and “could not” give the same testimony today in McCrory’s case.

The dentist fully recanted his statements from 40 years ago, adding that he no longer believes there is a scientific basis for saying the injury— “assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks” — could be matched to McCrory. He also said he never actually examined Julie’s body, and relied on photographs.

“My experience has taught me that human dentition is not totally unique,” he said. “I also believe that only in certain, very limited circumstances — not present in Mr. McCrory’s case — can the features of human dentition accurately be recorded in human skin.”

The evolving science and the expert’s recantation didn’t persuade Alabama. When McCrory’s team of lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Innocence Project asked for a new trial in the state courts in 2020, it was shot down.

Huffaker, the federal judge, called the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruling ambiguous and unreasonable, and said the state prosecutors’ arguments were not persuasive. Neither side disputes that the original 1985 testimony was unreliable and could not come into court today, he wrote.

Bite mark identification methods are “grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies,” the judge added.

“It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Prosecutors from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office argued in 2021 that, even without Souviron’s testimony, jurors could have looked at the photographs of Julie’s body and matched the markings themselves. The Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals agreed.

McCrory’s team found the suggestion preposterous. Huffaker did, too.

“This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence,” wrote Huffaker. “If an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

Huffaker added the dentist’s recantation was not rebutted by prosecutors and the state didn’t identify anyone who could say that the marks matched McCrory’s teeth.

“It makes little sense that a lay jury could permissibly form a conclusion that no forensic expert could... There is also no evidence that the two markings on (Julie’s) body are a human bitemark.”

Huffaker also noted other rulings across the country where people who were incarcerated solely on bite mark evidence have been exonerated.

McCrory’s lawyers cited 39 known wrongful convictions and indictments from bite mark forensics. Souviron’s past testimonies alone have led to at least two documented wrongful convictions, they added.

In those cases, the dentist said the suspects’ teeth matched marks on the victims. Each man — one in Massachusetts and one in Florida — was later exonerated after DNA proved who the killer was. Each served more than 30 years in prison.

AL.com reported on the case in depth, and the state’s reluctance to accept evolving scientific methods, in the 2025 series, Alabama Vs. Science.

Six years ago, the state offered McCrory a deal: If he said he killed his wife, he could walk out of prison.

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