After Bee investigation, Newsom signs law forcing CA sheriffs to announce jail deaths

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed into law new rules requiring California sheriffs to publicly announce when someone dies in custody, a change experts and advocates say is overdue and necessary to hold law enforcement accountable and ensure transparency of jails and prisons.

Citing a 2021 Sacramento Bee investigation into sheriffs’ failures to announce in-custody deaths, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, authored AB 2761. The measure requires sheriffs and state prison officials to publish basic details online about the person who died and the circumstances of their death. The details must be online within 10 days and updated as new information becomes available.

“I don’t think it’s that controversial,” McCarty told The Bee in an interview Friday. “Transparency on deaths in a government facility is common sense to me.”

The Bee previously reported that by last August, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office publicly announced just one death that year. In reality, by that point, six people had died in custody.

“This is wrong and breeds mistrust,” McCarty said at the time, vowing to change state law.

Experts agreed it was a glaring problem, especially because Sacramento County’s long-troubled jails — one downtown and another in Elk Grove — are under a federal court order to improve health care after incarcerated people alleged they were denied basic medical services and subjected to “inhumane” conditions.

Notifying the public when someone dies in a jail should be a basic expectation, particularly during a pandemic, corrections experts and watchdogs said. Failing to do so makes it harder for the public to understand what’s going on inside local lockups. That further fuels distrust in an era when law enforcement practices are under scrutiny.

At the time, the Sheriff’s Office justified its lack of public announcements by saying it was a standard practice to not issue a news release when people died of natural causes — a determination that can take days or weeks. The exception, a spokesman said, was if a media outlet reported “erroneous information.”

That was unacceptable, said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas. There was too great a likelihood that something could be labeled a “natural death” when it was actually something preventable, she said. Plus, any death should raise concerns because “jails have no greater responsibility than keeping the people in their care and control safe and alive.”

“This significant new legislation is a recognition of the importance of transparency when it comes to deaths in custody,” Deitch said. “I hope other states will follow California’s example.”

The Bee’s reporting also highlighted significant inconsistencies across counties. Some counties proactively post information within hours of a death. Others said nothing publicly at all.

Sheriffs who run California’s local jails, like all law enforcement agencies, are legally required to submit some information about deaths to the state Attorney General’s Office. While the state publishes an annual report about deaths based on that information, the data is often delayed several months and omits the names of those who died.

Those existing requirements should have been enough, the California State Sheriffs’ Association said. Forcing counties to post basic details on an existing website, the group argued, would be “a duplicative, costly, and unnecessary unfunded mandate.”

“Sometimes they don’t want to be forthright out of the gate with information on deaths in custody,” McCarty said, referring to local sheriffs. “At the end of the day, it’s about transparency, and just putting the information out there. Let the public make their own conclusion.”

McCarty’s bill won bipartisan support. It will take effect in January.

It also came two years after Newsom signed another of McCarty’s bills regarding oversight of county sheriffs. That measure, AB 1185, made it so voters and county boards of supervisors could establish sheriff oversight panels with subpoena power.

The change followed years of controversy involving now-outgoing Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones. Jones had been in a standoff with Rick Braziel, the inspector general who wrote a report critical of a deputy shooting. Jones ultimately locked Braziel out of the building, effectively ending his oversight of the department.

The new public reporting rules for in-custody deaths are essential, said Margot Mendelson, an attorney with the Prison Law Office, which settled a lawsuit against Sacramento County that demands improvements to health care services and jail conditions.

“Lack of transparency is a primary obstacle to holding correctional agencies accountable for failures and abuses,” Mendelson said Friday. “Communities deserve to understand what’s happening in their jails and prisons.”