The missing minutes in the footage are essential for outside investigators to get a complete understanding of what happened in Bonner’s case, according to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin. “In order to have a full appreciation of the circumstances surrounding a death in custody, it is critical to know everything that happened in the minutes leading up to that death,” she said in an email exchange. “For example, did anyone have physical contact with the person who died? Was she calling out for assistance? Did anyone pass by her cell and see her in distress?”

Citing the Trump DOJ cuts and executive orders, Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, urged state lawmakers throughout the country to take action. “As these critical vehicles for federal oversight of prisons and jails fall, there has never been a more urgent time to push for stronger oversight at the state level.”

“There has definitely been a resurgence of tough-on-crime legislation across the US and in Texas,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “Legislators always get a lot of political mileage out of filing these bills.”

MICHELE DEITCH: It would be an absolutely Kafkaesque situation where the family has no idea where the person is, what kind of conditions they're being held in, whether they're even alive.

“The whole intent of the provision in the Sandra Bland Act was to ensure that it was an independent, unbiased, objective investigation, something that the public could trust, that policymakers could trust, that it isn’t self-interested the way it would be if it’s an agency investigating itself,” said Michele Deitch, the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin and a consultant on the bill.

Michele Deitch is the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Jail staffers should have refused to accept Batts because he belonged in the hospital, she said. It’s problematic, she continued, that only a jail nurse evaluated his medical condition when he was brought there. “That’s the sort of thing that should be a trigger – not to accept someone like this,” she said. “You don’t want people in your jail who are ‘out of it,’ even if it’s drug intoxication … that’s not who you want in the jail.”

“The State Commission of Correction looks really good on paper, but it doesn’t do most of the things that it says it does,” Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told New York Focus in 2023.

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin, served as an expert consultant to one of the key authors of the bill. She highlighted the importance of independently investigating deaths that are attributed to natural causes, because they can be “entirely preventable.” “There’s an assumption here that just because a death is ‘natural,’ that it means there is nothing to be concerned about. But that’s not the case,” she said in a written statement. A detainee could be ignored for too long in their cell after a heart attack, she said as an example. There is also the possibility of an incarcerated person dying as a result of negligent medical care or a failure to follow protocols meant to stop the spread of an infectious disease, she said. “Without an independent investigation, the public and policymakers would never know that the so-called ‘natural death’ was attributable to something jail staff did or didn’t do, and there would be no guidance as to how such deaths could be prevented in the future,” Deitch said.

Michele Deitch, a UT Austin criminal justice expert who helped craft the law requiring independent jail death investigations, says the state is misinterpreting it. The jail commission should be the one appointing investigating agencies, not sheriff’s offices themselves, she said.

The rosters violate “both the letter and the spirit” of the Sandra Bland Act, Michele Deitch, a UT Austin law professor who served as an expert consultant to one of the key authors of the bill, told the Star-Telegram.