The Galveston County Sheriff’s Department in Galveston, Texas, filed a custodial death report (CDR) with the Office of the Attorney General about Jeanette Marie Pruitt on August 1, 2023. Ms. Pruitt died on July 3, 2023, 24 hours after she went through intake at the jail. Her cause of death is unknown and pending the results of an autopsy.

Inmate Cause of Death Statistics are Inconclusive

The causes of custodial deaths of detainees in county jails are often unknown even after an autopsy has been performed. There are often questions raised when detainees die, such as when deaths occur for unknown reasons, when multiple deaths occur in one county, and when suicides occur when it was known a detainee was a suicide risk.

In the summer of 2023, jails have come under scrutiny because many deaths by unknown causes or because of heart attacks seem as though they may have been heat-related deaths. No detainee has died as a result of a heat-related illness, according to reporting by Texas jails, since 2012. That statistic suspiciously follows a year in which at least 10 detainees died of heat stroke.

There is evidence that custodial deaths have been linked to the heat, even if the Texas justice system doesn’t acknowledge them. In 2018, a medical examiner ruled that a 54-year-old detainee in a Texas county died of environmental hypothermia or heat stroke. However, that ruling has not been acknowledged by the justice system in Texas.

Learn more in Part 1 and this continuing series.

This website has as one of its purposes to provide resources helpful to Texas inmates detained in county and city jails. There is never an intention of intimating that individuals or institutions have been involved in wrongdoing.

–Guest Contributor