This means that the 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. Deitch, who served as an expert consultant to one of the key authors of the bill, said she was unaware that the commission was interpreting the law this way until the Star-Telegram brought it to her attention.
“It violates both the letter and the spirit of that statute,” she said in an interview. “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.”
In Tarrant County, 26 deaths of people in the custody of the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office between October 2021 and July 2024 were not investigated by independent agencies as a result of the commission’s failure to comply with the law. The Fort Worth Police Department was listed on the custodial death reports sent to the Attorney General’s Office as the investigating agency for the deaths, but it was only reviewing the Sheriff’s Office’s investigations of those deaths, according to a police spokesperson.
“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.”
Wood, the jail commission’s executive director, did not respond to interview requests for this story, but acknowledged that the commission merely approves investigating agencies chosen by sheriffs.
Others agree: Texas jail commission not following the law
Multiple lawyers and advocates for families of people who have died in jails agree with Deitch that the commission has been in violation of the law for over seven years.