At age 42, Valorin Michele Rodriguez died on February 5, 2018, while in the custody of Winkler County Jail in Kermit, Texas. The custodial death report provided few details, though nothing to indicate the cause of death. It appears, based on what was stated, that she had been serving a 10-day sentence.

The Texas Attorney General’s office provides access to different types of law enforcement data online, including custodial death reports. By making these reports accessible, the public is supposedly seeing information that can ensure that jails are held accountable if the rights of inmates are violated. However, the reports reveal far less these days than they did before a policy change occurred.

For instance, custodial death reports previously went into great detail about events that are known to have occurred with regard to a deceased inmate, and the reports were as long as they needed to be for the information to be included. Now, there is a limit on the length. The information that can be found now is comparatively void of details.

In January 2021, for instance, an inmate at a Texas county jail had been incarcerated for one month when he was found unresponsive in his single cell. Medical aid was provided but he was pronounced dead within about 90 minutes.

In this ongoing series, learn about details provided in a previous type of custodial death report. The changes in these reports suggest that the issue of accountability is moving backward instead of forward.

The posts on this website are provided as a way of helping prisoners now or previously incarcerated at a county jail in Texas. There is not an intention on this site to suggest that institutions or persons have engaged in wrongs.

–Guest Contributor