Despite growing scrutiny and widespread condemnation, Minnesota lawmakers have failed to ban the use of the term “excited delirium” by law enforcement. This decision perpetuates the use of a diagnosis that has been widely discredited and criticized as a pseudoscientific and racist excuse to justify the deaths of individuals in police custody.
For decades, police across the United States have used “excited delirium” to rationalize the fatal use of force, even though several medical associations have decried the term. The controversial diagnosis gained national attention during the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted for the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Defense attorneys in the case argued that Floyd’s death was due to excited delirium, not the nearly nine minutes Chauvin knelt on his neck. The video of Floyd’s death, seen by millions, spurred a global movement against police brutality and systemic racism.
In an effort to curb the misuse of this term, Minnesota state Rep. Jessica Hanson introduced a bill earlier this year aimed at prohibiting law enforcement from using excited delirium to justify force and from receiving training in the condition. Hanson described the term as “rooted in anti-Black racism,” reflecting widespread criticism from medical professionals and civil rights advocates.
If passed, Minnesota would have joined California and Colorado as the only states to ban the term, which the American Medical Association has labeled “a manifestation of systemic racism.”
However, despite bipartisan negotiations extending into the final weeks of the legislative session, the bill failed to pass. The session concluded on May 20 without the measure being enacted, leaving the controversial practice intact in Minnesota.
Now, the origins of “excited delirium” trace back to the early 1980s in South Florida, where Dr. Charles Wetli, then deputy medical examiner for Miami-Dade County, used it to describe the deaths of 19 Black women who were prostitutes and had traces of cocaine in their systems.
These deaths were later attributed to a serial killer, yet Wetli continued using the term to explain the deaths of individuals in police custody, often under dubious circumstances involving excessive force and restraint.
Criticism of the term intensified after the 2020 death of George Floyd, leading to heightened scrutiny by medical professionals. A 2022 study by Physicians for Human Rights noted that “excited delirium” is disproportionately used to explain the deaths of young Black men in police encounters, often as a catch-all to obscure the role of law enforcement violence.
California became the first state to ban the use of “excited delirium” in October 2023, following the 2020 death of Angelo Quinto, a Filipino-American Navy veteran. Quinto died after police restrained him during a mental health crisis, with initial autopsy reports citing excited delirium—a conclusion later challenged by an independent autopsy that attributed his death to asphyxiation.
Similarly, Colorado banned the term in April, inspired in part by the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died after police in Aurora restrained him and administered a high dose of ketamine. The coroner initially suggested excited delirium as a cause, despite the absence of stimulants in McClain’s system. Later, the cause of death was officially changed to “complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint.”
While states like California and Colorado have made strides in eliminating the use of excited delirium in law enforcement, Minnesota’s failure to pass the ban highlights the ongoing struggle against systemic racism in policing practices. Advocates argue that more states need to follow suit to prevent the term from being misused to justify excessive force and in-custody deaths.
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