Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Texas jail commission hasn’t complied with custody death investigation law for 7 years

The Texas agency responsible for regulating county jails has failed for years to ensure that all inmate deaths are investigated by independent third-party law enforcement agencies, a key provision of the state’s 2017 Sandra Bland Act.

Instead, the state’s sheriff’s offices that operate the jails have been able to choose which law enforcement agencies they want appointed to investigate deaths of inmates in their custody.

That erodes public trust in transparent, thorough examinations of how and why people die in Texas jails, say legal experts and watchdog groups. At worst, it creates opportunities to conceal failures or wrongdoing by jailers, medical staff or arresting officers, as well as broader systemic issues with conditions in corrections facilities.

The Sandra Bland Act, named after a Black woman who died in jail near Houston after being arrested over a traffic violation, sought to enshrine additional layers of accountability for how inmates are treated in jail, particularly those with mental health or intellectual disabilities. The law requires the state’s regulatory agency, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, to “appoint” third-party law enforcement to investigate deaths “as soon as possible.”

Texas Commission on Jail Standards has not complied with the law for nearly the entire time it has been on the books, said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin.

“It’s allowing agencies to figure out who’s going to investigate them,” Deitch said. “That defeats the entire point of independence. The whole idea is that you don’t want it to be tainted by any appearance of impropriety, any appearance that there’s a conflict of interest.”

The rosters from the sheriff’s offices are ostensibly meant to help expedite investigations of deaths that occur during off hours like nights and weekends, according to Krishnaveni Gundu, executive director of Texas Jail Project, an advocacy organization for incarcerated Texans and their families.

“To add insult to injury, families who have lost loved ones in the custody of Sheriff (Bill) Waybourn have been traumatized repeatedly by the lack of any remedial measures from the only regulatory agency with any power to do so,” Gundu said, referring to the jail commission.

The commission’s oversight has broader implications for systemic issues in county jails, as well, experts say.

In early February, a federal judge dismissed Tarrant County from a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Anthony Johnson Jr., a Marine veteran who died during an altercation with guards in April 2024. Johnson’s death was ruled a homicide, and two jailers face murder charges.

The judge ruled that the lawsuit failed to prove that Johnson’s death was a result of broader “conditions of confinement,” attributing his death to the isolated acts of the individuals involved.

Proper third-party investigations serve to document such systemic issues, said Deitch, the UT professor.

“You want to get into some of the deeper questions,” she said. “Is the jail understaffed? Is there a lot of contraband coming into the jail? If someone’s dying of drugs, is there a problem with drugs in the jail?”

Full Article at Fort Worth Star-Telegram