SACRAMENTO — California is the first state to ban doctors and medical examiners from attributing deaths to the controversial diagnosis known as “excited delirium,” which a human rights activist hailed as a “watershed moment” that could make it harder for police to justify excessive force.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Oct. 8 to prohibit coroners, medical examiners, physicians, or physician assistants from listing excited delirium on a person’s death certificate or in an autopsy report. Law enforcement won’t be allowed to use the term to describe a person’s behavior in any incident report, and testimony that refers to excited delirium won’t be allowed in civil court. The law takes effect in January.
The term excited delirium has been around for decades but has been used increasingly over the past 15 years to explain how a person experiencing severe agitation can die suddenly through no fault of the police. It was cited as a legal defense in the 2020 deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis; Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York; and Angelo Quinto in Antioch, California, among others.
Related: Police blame some deaths on ‘excited delirium.’ ER docs consider pulling the plug on the term
“This is a watershed moment in California and nationwide,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a lawyer with the New York-based Physicians for Human Rights, who co-authored a 2022 report on the use of the diagnosis.
“In a wrongful death lawsuit, if excited delirium comes up, it’s a big hurdle for a family getting justice if their family member was actually killed by police,” Naples-Mitchell said. “So, now it will be basically impossible for them to offer testimony on excited delirium in California.”
Even though the new law makes California the first state to no longer recognize excited delirium as a medical diagnosis, several national medical associations already discredited it. Since 2020, the American Medical Association and the American…
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