Miranda Louise Grayson Dies in Hutchinson County, Texas Jail

The Hutchinson County Sheriff’s Department, in Borger and Stinnett, Texas, filed a custodial death report regarding the death of Miranda Louise Grayson. Ms. Grayson was only 35 years old at the time of her death. We provide in this post information we obtained from that report, and we make no allegation of any wrongdoing against anyone.

The report indicates that Ms. Grayson was initially in custody at 3:17 PM on May 23, 2022, and that she passed away on May 24, 2022. It further indicates that she died of hanging/strangulation, and that she was arrested only for possession of a controlled substance. Upon information and belief, the report falsely indicates that she had been convicted of this offense.

Our Texas jail neglect, abuse, and suicide law firm reviews numerous custodial death reports in Texas in connection with our cases. Therefore, we are very familiar with the summary portion of such reports, and what law enforcement agencies around Texas typically include. The summary portion for Ms. Grayson is one of the shortest that we have ever reviewed, and it reads in its entirety, “Deceased was located in her cell hanging from the upper vent by a bed sheet. Died as a result of her injuries the next day.”

This provides absolutely no information to the family or public as to whether Ms. Grayson was being observed as appropriate, what might have been noticed when she was observed, whether she had been provided with items with which she could form a ligature after demonstrating that she might have self-harm tendencies, or anything else at all specific about how Ms. Grayson was being treated and/or watched while she was incarcerated in the jail. One of the purposes of sheriff’s departments around Texas filing custodial death reports is so that the public, and families of those who die, will have some sense of what occurred. The Hutchinson County Sheriff’s Department decided to provide very little information regarding Ms. Grayson’s death, and one wonders why.

The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right of those in jail to be protected not only from others, but from themselves. When a person has suicidal tendencies known to jailers, and/or in other situations where such tendencies may not be directly known, and jailers or others are deliberately indifferent to the person’s needs and/or act objectively unreasonably, and the person dies as a result, whether through suicide or otherwise, then certain surviving family members may be able to file a lawsuit. Our Texas law firm has found that, unfortunately, there’s an epidemic of suicide in our jails. Jails have generally not done enough to protect inmates from the most common manner in which they die in our jails. Something needs to be done to curb the epidemic. We have a number of suicide cases pending, and are investigating others. It seems that perhaps litigation may be the unfortunate solution to jails not performing their constitutional duties.

Regardless, as we point out above, we do not have enough information to determine at this point whether there are any constitutional violations that occurred in the Hutchinson County jail and which led to the death of Ms. Grayson. More information would be needed to make that determination.

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