Thread by @DrKillgrove

This 217-page report is... something. Still trying to process all the WTF'ery in it, but it kinda seems like ESH. Anyone interested in bio/arch/forensic ethics should read it.

(Trigger warning for gratuitous inclusion of photographs of violence being done to Black men.)

https://twitter.com/pennmuseum/status/1430550284636409859

So, the report is by a law firm hired by Penn to investigate. They interviewed a ton of people and read loads of stuff to produce the report. However, the report seems to be focused on basically establishing that Penn didn't know what was up. Anyway, some things I learned...

Starting on p. 34 of the report, there is an explanation of the recovery of the remains from the MOVE bombing. This is important from a forensic standpoint and clarifies why there are few remains from certain individuals - the city basically just scooped up rubble w/ a crane.

Between the City, the medical examiner's office, and the MOVE commission, there was a lot of finger-pointing in 1985 about mishandling of the situation and evidence. This made the City hire more forensic pathologists to help with IDs and cause of death.

Then the anthropologists get involved: Alan Mann, Janet Monge, Judy Suchey. They don't seem to agree with the MOVE Commission report on the ID of one individual, labeled B-1 and assumed to be Katricia Africa.

The timeline gets confusing on p. 38, as it notes that (some) remains were released to Katricia's father / a funeral home in 1985 for burial. Then goes on to say that the assistant ME gave some of these bones to Alan Mann in early 1986 for further study.

Mann and his then-grad student Janet Monge apparently studied the bones closely and felt they didn't match with an ID of Katricia. Additional anthros examined them over the years and came to similar conclusions: the age-at-death of the remains was too old to be her.

So if the remains weren't Katricia's, whose were they? One theory is that Katricia escaped the MOVE house before the bombing but was killed in one of the nearby houses that also caught fire. This theory doesn't suggest whose remains were those un-ID'ed in the house, though.

The original forensic reports are Exhibits in this legal investigation. They're quite interesting and do indeed paint a picture of confusion in the recovery of remains and unclear ID of individual B-1.

The report suggests there were a few failed attempts over the years where Monge tried to contact MOVE members to assist in positively ID'ing the B-1 remains.

Exhibit 16 of the report details Monge's emails with an investigative reporter in 2014, in which he suggests getting Katricia's mother's DNA "somehow without her consent".

And p. 65 of the report notes: "emails from January to March 2019 document Monge & Burnley’s plans to “stakeout” Consuewella Africa’s home in order to obtain a DNA sample from her trash. [...] they decided against going through [her] trash because they thought it was unethical."

So it seems like Monge was trying to positively ID the remains between 2014-19 in order to return them to appropriate members of the Africa family, and ended up jettisoning unethical and illegal ideas for how to do so.

Then it gets weirder. Starting on p. 51, the report suggests that the precipitating event for this ethical issue coming to light was an academic struggle over the Samuel Morton Collection, also at Penn.

More precisely, the report calls out a graduate student, Paul Mitchell, as the whistleblower. But it also paints him as a loose cannon trying to get Monge fired so that he could take her job.

In her statement, Exhibit 14, Monge writes that "this is a willful retaliation because I reported Paul Mitchell in May 2019 for plagiarism, violence, and theft of forensic specimens and was barred from access to any of the Penn Museum Physical Anthropology collections."

Monge suggests that Mitchell, with goading from his new advisor Deborah Thomas, went to the press about the MOVE remains to discredit her and her work.

Just before he did that, though, Mitchell seems to have talked to Chris Woods at the Penn Museum, noting in Exhibit 13 that he wanted to bring to light the un-accessioned remains in the lab.

Those un-accessioned forensic remains, Mitchell says, included the MOVE bones, as well as some from H.H. Holmes (a famous serial killer whose remains were supposed to have been fully reburied) and archaeological remains from Botswana.

The un-accessioned remains situation is not great, but access to the bones and the lab is problematic as well, and Mitchell's actions are odd:

"In 2017, he [Mitchell] admitted to taking some human remains from the Museum to his home and also leaving them at the home of a friend before returning them to an undisclosed location in the Museum," the report notes on p. 62.

At any rate, when the MOVE remains became news, the Penn Museum deputy director told Monge to bring the remains in question to Mann, and then had a funeral home drive over to pick up the remains from Mann, who seemed confused about the whole process.

This legal report does a lot of CYA for Penn, noting that no administrators were aware of how the remains were being used. But also that use of the MOVE remains in a Coursera online course didn't flout any professional ethics (here I disagree, of course).

However, on p. 76, the report notes that "We do conclude that Mann’s cavalier treatment in the storage and retention of the remains from 1986-2001 and Monge’s similar actions from 2001-2019 exhibited extremely poor judgment and gross insensitivity to the moral, social, and..."

"...political implications of their conduct. Furthermore, their actions were inconsistent with the implied overarching principle of the respectful treatment of human remains."

There's even more in the details, such as a Penn undergraduate who did x-rays and a paper on *two* bodies from the MOVE house but which Monge says isn't true. There are definite questions surrounding remains from a second body, though.

And a letter signed by a number of prominent biological anthropologists in support of Monge's curatorship of the Morton Collection, noting that "descriptions in the media have been fueled by individuals on the Penn campus with careerist motivations..." (Exhibit 25)

The original MOVE bombing was horrible and violent, and the 35-year mess of analysis/curation issues does not reflect well on the Penn Museum.

The law firm suggests a number of recommendations starting on p. 83 that, if implemented, could help Penn at least prevent this from happening again. Specifically, they suggest:

1) Appoint a multidisciplinary committee to help with town-gown relations.
2) Create a permanent installation to teach people about the bombing.
3) Hire a diversity officer for the Penn Museum.
4) Hire a bioarch w/ experience advocating for BIPOC.

5) Inventory human remains, reassess practices relating to how they're used at Penn.
6) Create an exhibit with the African American Museum in Philly on the role of anthropology in development of scientific racism.
7) Establish scholarship to recruit students from W Philly.

I very much like these recommendations. And I hope the diversification of museum personnel and additional hires help Penn move forward and be more proactive in repatriating and decolonizing their museum.

I don't think Penn is alone in this, though. Many, many other universities and museums need to reckon with their possession of human remains and how their faculty research/teach with them.

The media response to this actually gives me hope, even as this report castigates the "inaccurate narrative circulated with warped [sic] speed across print and electronic media and the internet and fueled much of the resulting public expressions of outrage and condemnation."(p.4)

We should be bringing these unethical situations to light and fixing them as best we can. And I'm heartened by the sheer number of recent journal articles and conference panels that tackle these complicated issues.

Those are my main thoughts tonight. Very interested to read what others think about this report, though. What's your impression of it?