American Autopsy, Michael M. Baden, MD
American Autopsy, Michael M. Baden, MD
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American Autopsy
One Medical Examiner's Decades-Long Fight for Racial Justice in a Broken Legal System

Author: Michael M. Baden, MD

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 11 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/08/2023

Synopsis

Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in United States history, from the government's 1976 re-investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the 2014 death of Michael Brown, whose case sparked the initial Ferguson protests that grew into the Black Lives Matter movement.

The playbook hasn't changed since 1979, when Dr. Baden was demoted from his job as New York City's Chief Medical Examiner after ruling that the death of a Black man in police custody was a homicide.

So in 2020 when the Floyd family, wary of the same system that oversaw George Floyd's death, needed a second opinion—Dr. Baden is who they called.

In these pages, Dr. Baden chronicles his six decades on the front lines of the fight for accountability within the legal system.

In the process, he brings to life the political issues that go on in the wake of often unrecorded fatal police encounters and the standoff between law enforcement and those they are sworn to protect.

Full of behind-the-scenes drama and surprising revelations, American Autopsy is both timely and crucial for this turning point in our nation's history.

About Michael M. Baden, MD

Michael M. Baden, MD, is a physician, former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and former Chief Forensic Pathologist for the New York State Police and has held professorial teaching appointments at Albert Einstein Medical School, Albany Medical College, New York University Medical School, New York Law School, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was chairman of the Forensic Pathology Panel of the United States Congress Select Committee on Assassinations. Dr. Baden has been consulted as an expert in the investigations of the deaths of many government officials, celebrities, and other high-profile individuals, in many countries around the world. Dr. Baden was the host of HBO's Autopsy series for twelve years, has written two nonfiction books on forensic science: Unnatural Death, Confessions of a Medical Examiner and Dead Reckoning, the New Science of Catching Killers, and is co-author, with his wife, attorney Linda Kenney Baden, of two forensic thrillers, Remains Silent and Skeleton Justice. He is the forensic science contributor for FOX National News and is a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David on January 12, 2023

In my ever-growing (and quite unintentional) research into the endless failings of the criminal justice system, I had never considered autopsies to be a major source of fraud. Or even of any real interest. How naïve. Dr Michael Baden sets this straight in American Autopsy, based on his nearly 70 yea......more

Goodreads review by Stitching on January 30, 2023

Interesting and sometimes heartbreaking. We rarely think of politics when we think of medicine even when it's forensic, there is something uncomfortable in thinking about it that way and this book offers a rather unflinching if very human approach to the question. I particularly enjoyed the section w......more

Goodreads review by Steven on January 10, 2024

I enjoyed this chronicle of a man fighting for intellectual honesty in his field. Just as the book TY COBB by Charles Leerhsen attempts to expose decades of lies being told about the baseball great, so this book attempts to point out the use of non-existent medical diagnoses to explain-away deaths t......more

Goodreads review by Cory on March 30, 2025

Dead all along 5/5 -- a must read The common refrain we hear in America is that the criminal legal system is "broken." But Dr. Michael Baden's book proves the exact opposite -- the system is working exactly as it was intended by allowing police to murder Black & Brown citizens with impunity. Part auto......more

Goodreads review by Kristi on April 25, 2023

Science first captured my attention in high school when we began studying DNA. I was intrigued by how our genes could be identified by looking at our parents' cross-sections. I spent a great deal of time working on Punnett squares to see how my DNA could compare to my parents'. I absolutely loved it......more

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