At least 33 people have died in custody in District of Columbia

How deaths in custody are reported in the District of Columbia

The District of Columbia has had no prison of its own since November 2001, when the D.C. Department of Corrections closed the last of its seven prisons, at the Lorton Correctional Complex in Virginia. A 1997 act of Congress sent people sentenced for felonies in the District to prisons run or contracted by the federal Bureau of Prisons, and the department moved more than 10,000 people to federal prisons across the country.¹ The department runs the D.C. Jail: the Central Detention Facility, opened in 1976, and the Correctional Treatment Facility beside it, opened in 1992, which holds everyone in the department's custody who does not identify as male. The jail holds people awaiting trial, people serving short sentences, and people waiting to be moved to federal prisons.² Since 2013 the department has also run the Central Cell Block, where people arrested by the Metropolitan Police Department are held until they first see a judge.³

The Corrections Oversight Improvement Omnibus Amendment Act of 2022 requires the department to tell the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, the chair of the D.C. Council's committee on corrections and the Corrections Information Council in writing within 24 hours of a death. Within three days it must post a notice on its website giving the person's name, gender, race, ethnicity and age, the date, time and place of death and the circumstances, reissue the notice once the cause and manner of death are known, and keep notices online for at least ten years. The same law requires the Corrections Information Council to publish a report on every death in a department facility within 30 days.⁴ The Council made these provisions take effect only once they were funded, and the D.C. Code records them as not implemented.³⁵ In 2025 the D.C. Auditor reported that elected officials had not funded them, so the requirements are not in effect.²

The department says it follows the notification process anyway.⁶ Since November 2022 it has posted notices of most deaths in its newsroom, and it publishes a yearly table of the people who died in its custody, with each person's name, age, race and ethnicity, the date, time and place of death, and the cause and manner of death found by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.⁷⁶ The tables name at least 29 people who died from January 2022 through May 2026.⁶ The Corrections Information Council, an independent oversight body created by Congress and the D.C. Council, inspects the jail and the federal prisons that hold D.C. residents, sends out alerts on some deaths, and counts deaths in its yearly report on the department.⁸⁹

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants collects the District's data. In its 2023 plan it wrote that the District "does not have a DCRA reporting law nor a website where reported deaths are listed." The Metropolitan Police Department's Central Cell Block, the Department of Corrections and the two juvenile centers of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services report deaths to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which keeps them in a password-protected spreadsheet; the grants office checks them against news and social media and uploads them to the federal government.¹⁰

What has changed

1. 1802James McGirk was hanged, the first recorded execution in Washington. Before 1976, at least 118 people were executed in the District.¹¹
2. 1957The District executed Robert Carter, its last execution. His jury had recommended mercy, but District law at the time made a death sentence mandatory.¹¹
3. 1972-1992The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia voided the District's death penalty in 1972, and the D.C. Council repealed it in 1981. In a 1992 referendum ordered by Congress, District voters rejected the death penalty by 2 to 1.¹¹
4. 2001On November 19 the department closed Central Facility at Lorton, the last of its prisons, ending the District's prison system.¹
5. 2002-2007After two people were stabbed to death at the jail in December 2002, the D.C. Council ordered a study of the jail's capacity, completed in 2004. In 2007 District leaders capped the Central Detention Facility at 2,164 people.²
6. 2004Jonathan Magbie, 27, who was quadriplegic, died on September 24 at Greater Southeast Community Hospital after days in the District's custody. A wrongful death suit brought by the ACLU for his mother, Mary Scott, said jail and hospital staff failed to treat his pneumonia, left him dehydrated and malnourished, and never gave him the ventilator he needed to breathe. In 2008 the District and the hospital settled for an undisclosed sum, and correctional officials agreed to send people whose medical needs the jail cannot meet to facilities that can.¹²
7. 2013Paul Mannina, 58, died by suicide in his cell at the D.C. Jail on June 18. Walter Calloway, 42, and Mike Johnson, 53, died in their cells there on June 29 and August 5, in what the department called apparent suicides.^13141516 Victoria Mannina sued the District over Paul Mannina's death in 2015; the District settled in August 2024 for $1.5 million.¹⁷²
8. 2020Deon Crowell, 51, died of COVID-19 on April 13, the first death from the virus at the D.C. Jail.¹⁸ The ACLU of the District of Columbia and the Public Defender Service had sued the department on March 30 over its handling of the virus. A federal judge found that the department had shown deliberate indifference to the safety of the people it held and ordered changes; in a settlement approved in April 2022, the department agreed to unannounced inspections by an infectious disease specialist.¹⁹
9. 2021During the week of October 18, the U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia made an unannounced inspection of the jail and found that conditions at the Central Detention Facility did not meet the minimum federal standards for detention. The Marshals Service decided to move all of the roughly 400 people it held there to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.²⁰
10. 2022At least eight people died in the department's custody.²¹ Treyvon Littles, 25, died on August 11, a day after staff found him unresponsive in his cell. Councilmember Charles Allen learned of his death two days later from the Corrections Information Council, not from the department, which was not then required to tell the D.C. Council or the public; his mother, Althea Littles, asked why her son was handcuffed to a hospital bed after he had died.²² I found a newsroom notice from the department for only one of the eight deaths, in November.⁷ In December the Council passed the Corrections Oversight Improvement Omnibus Amendment Act, which took effect in April 2023 without its death notification provisions.⁴³
11. 2023On June 14 the department announced the death of Stephen Bragg, 45, who had collapsed in the jail's intake center and died on January 25, nearly five months earlier.²³ Darrow Johnson, 34, died on August 19, two days after another resident stabbed him at the Correctional Treatment Facility.²⁴ Antonio Dockery, 39, died in the Central Cell Block on October 23, after staff found him unresponsive in his cell.²⁵²⁶ In April, the Washington Lawyers' Committee and its partners filed a class action on behalf of people at the jail with serious medical needs, challenging the department's health care.²⁷
12. 2024At least nine people died in the department's custody.²⁸ Sincere Howard, 23, and Dominique Brown, 22, died eight days apart in May; the medical examiner ruled both deaths accidental overdoses involving fentanyl.²⁸
13. 2025In May, the D.C. Auditor published a review of the jail by the Council for Court Excellence, which found that the rate of deaths in the jail from July 2023 to June 2024 was more than three and a half times the national rate for jails, and the rate of overdose deaths ten times the national rate. It called for the jail to be replaced immediately.² Carlos Shelley, 29, died on May 12 after another resident stabbed him at the Central Detention Facility.²⁹ Kelly Williams, 53, was found unresponsive in her cell at the Correctional Treatment Facility on October 8; the medical examiner found that she died of diabetic ketoacidosis.³⁰³¹
14. 2026By June 15, the department's table listed at least three people who had died in its custody during the year.³²

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The department's counts do not always match what it gives its auditors. The D.C. Auditor's review found that ten deaths of people in the department's custody were reported from July 2023 through June 2024, including one person who died at a Veterans Affairs hospital, about whom the department gave the auditors no information.² The department's yearly tables list nine people for those months, and none of them died at a Veterans Affairs hospital.²⁶²⁸ The Corrections Information Council counted eight deaths in the department's fiscal year 2024, which ran from October 2023 to September 2024, the same number as the tables.⁹²⁸

The newsroom notices are incomplete and sometimes late. I found no notice for Larry James Watson Jr., who died in September 2023, or for Richard Durrell Holland, who died in August 2024, though both appear in the department's tables, and Stephen Bragg's death was announced nearly five months after it happened.^7262823 The notices give the place and time of death and say that the medical examiner will rule on the cause; the auditor found that the department gives "minimal and inconsistent data" about deaths to the public, oversight bodies and families. One woman told the auditor's reviewers that she spent years seeking the department's report on the death of her children's father, and that the report she finally got was "missing hundreds of pages" and left out that "no one found his body for 8 hours."²

The department's own death reports, which it does not publish, show what the notices leave out. Reading them, the auditor's reviewers found that actions taken or not taken by department staff and contractors may have contributed to four of the eight deaths they examined. Officers skipped required 30-minute checks, turned off their body-worn cameras and rewrote security check logs. One officer saw a resident lying on the cell floor and did not check for signs of life; by the time anyone did, rigor mortis had set in. In the one homicide of the review year, a single officer was escorting ten residents to a medical appointment, and no one had searched the attacker. As far as the reviewers could determine, the department had never produced a report analyzing its deaths to find ways to prevent them.²