At least 352 people have died in custody in Idaho

How deaths in custody are reported in Idaho

The Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) runs the state's prisons and community reentry centers, and holds people in two private prisons in Arizona that CoreCivic runs: Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy and Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex.¹² In March 2026 IDOC held just under 10,000 people, against 8,200 beds in its own 10 prisons, and had sent about 700 of them to prisons out of state.² County sheriffs run 36 jails. The Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections runs three facilities for young people, and 11 other agencies run juvenile detention centers.³

No state agency regulates or inspects Idaho's county jails. The Idaho Sheriffs' Association inspects them against standards the sheriffs set, but the inspections are voluntary and scheduled months ahead, and no one can force a jail that fails to comply. The association is exempt from the state's public records law, and its director refused to give InvestigateWest the inspection reports, calling them "a courtesy" to sheriffs. In 2024, 14 of 35 jails failed standards the association calls mandatory.⁴ No Idaho law requires a jail to report or investigate a death.⁵⁶

Idaho has no law requiring any agency to report a death in custody to the state.⁷³ For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Idaho Statistical Analysis Center, part of the Idaho State Police, asks police departments, sheriffs, IDOC, the Department of Juvenile Corrections and the local juvenile detention centers each quarter to report deaths in their custody and during arrests. Until mid-2025 agencies filled in a PDF form and emailed it back; since July 2025 they file through an online portal. The form for juvenile facilities asks only for a young person's initials.⁷³ The analysis center checks the reports against news coverage and the Mapping Police Violence database, and writes a report from public sources when an agency does not file one.³ The State Police publishes no list or count of the deaths reported to it.⁸

IDOC announces some deaths in short news releases that do not name the person who died.⁹ Its research reports and dashboards cover population, releases and recidivism, with no count of deaths.¹⁰ The department's own records of deaths from 2005 through 2024, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, list at least 373 people who died in its custody, including people held in Arizona and Texas, with names only for 2024.¹¹

Idaho certified the Elmore County and Jefferson County jails to hold people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The two jails reported 416 ICE detentions in the first half of 2025, up from 65 in the same months of 2024.¹² ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹³

What has changed

1. 1885On September 18, armed, masked men stopped a Shoshone County deputy and six men he had deputized as they took five Chinese men, among them Lee Kee Nam, from Pierce City toward the county seat at Murray. The men made the officers give up their weapons and hanged all five prisoners from a pole lashed between two pine trees. No one was charged.¹⁴
2. 1904On June 2, masked men who outnumbered a party of officers three to one took Thomas Myers from them near White Bird as the officers were taking him to the county jail, and lynched him.¹⁵
3. 1864-1957Idaho carried out at least 26 executions before 1976. The counties hanged people, often in public, until executions moved to the state prison in 1901; the last hanging was in 1957.¹⁶
4. 1994Idaho executed Keith Wells by lethal injection, its first execution in 36 years. Wells had dropped his appeals and asked to be put to death.¹⁶¹⁷
5. 2001Charles Fain was freed after DNA testing excluded him and pointed to two other men, after 18 years on Idaho's death row.¹⁶
6. 2011On November 18, Idaho executed Paul Rhoades by lethal injection, its first execution in 17 years. His appeals had centered on his abusive childhood and drug addiction, and he had challenged lethal injection as cruel.¹⁸¹⁷
7. 2012In March, a federal judge unsealed a report by Dr. Marc Stern, an expert in Balla v. Idaho State Board of Correction, the class action over conditions at the Idaho State Correctional Institution (ISCI) near Boise. Stern found officials "deliberately indifferent" to the health care needs of the people held there and wrote that substandard care may in some cases have caused deaths; Idaho officials and the prison's medical contractor, Corizon, called the report "misleading and erroneous."¹⁹ On June 12, Idaho executed Richard Leavitt by lethal injection.²⁰ Four days earlier, Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote that Leavitt's trial and sentencing "failed, at numerous points, to comply with the Constitution," that his lawyer at resentencing never sought the brain scan a court-appointed neurologist had recommended, and that Leavitt had no constitutional right to make the state release crime-scene blood samples for DNA testing.²¹
8. 2015-2017In 2015 the federal court sanctioned the state for falsifying and manipulating medical records, which misled the court's special master in the Balla case.²² In March 2017, lawyers for the people held at ISCI asked the court to fine the state more than $24 million, citing court records that showed death rates at the prison outpacing the national average and saying IDOC had accepted Corizon's reports that it was "100 percent compliant" without checking them.²³ In September the court found the state in contempt for failing to follow its 2014 order.²²
9. 2018Lance Quick, 40, died on December 14 after six days in a bare holding cell at the Bannock County jail, with no bed, sink or toilet. He stopped eating and drinking and missed about 10 meals, and no record shows that he got his medication, although his family called the jail repeatedly about his medical needs. An autopsy found that he died of starvation and dehydration.²⁴⁴ A special prosecutor wrote in 2021 that the conduct of sheriff's office employees "contributed in significant ways" to his death, but brought no charges. The county paid his parents $2.1 million, according to the Idaho State Journal.²⁴
10. 2019Colby Bray, 18, told staff at the Juvenile Corrections Center in St. Anthony on November 21 that he felt sick. His parents' lawsuit says staff gave him Gatorade, ibuprofen and other over-the-counter medicine for three days while he kept vomiting, and sent him to a hospital only on November 24, when his resting heart rate was 143. He died the next day of sepsis.²⁵ In October, the Idaho State Police began collecting reports of deaths in custody for the federal government.⁷
11. 2020IDOC began holding people at Saguaro Correctional Center in Arizona under a contract with CoreCivic.²⁶ A 70-year-old man held there died on October 17, one of at least six people whose deaths in IDOC custody in 2020 the department recorded as COVID-related.¹¹ In May, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ended the Balla case, finding no constitutional violation in the medical care at ISCI; the Ninth Circuit affirmed on March 22, 2022.²⁷²²
12. 2022-2023A 2022 law kept the sources of Idaho's execution drugs secret, and a 2023 law allowed the state to execute people by firing squad if it could not obtain the drugs.¹⁶ Tim Riley, 31, died by suicide in the Canyon County jail in June 2023, less than two hours after an earlier attempt. His wife had asked that he be put on suicide watch, and a mental health provider cleared him without recommending closer supervision. Video showed that Deputy Joshua Barnett's three checks over 69 minutes each lasted under a minute, though his log recorded three to five minutes each, and that he skipped the bathroom; jail policy required checks at least every 20 minutes. The sheriff's office did not fire Barnett. About a week later Michael Garrett, 40, was found dead in a cell in the same jail.⁶ The jail never told Riley's wife of his death; she learned of it from his mother.⁵ Milo Warnock, 45, was beaten to death in a maximum-security cell at the Idaho State Correctional Center on December 10, 2023.²⁸¹¹
13. 2024Cory Ferguison died by suicide in the Canyon County jail on February 1.⁶ On February 28, IDOC tried to execute Thomas Creech by lethal injection, after about 50 years in prison. His lawyer said the judge who had sentenced him and prison staff supported clemency; the Commission of Pardons and Parole split 3-3 on recommending it, which denied it.²⁹ IDOC Director Josh Tewalt said the medical team tried eight times to set an IV line in his arms, legs, hands and feet; his lawyers said it tried 10 times. After about 45 minutes, with the team running short of supplies, the state called the execution off. The Federal Defender Services of Idaho said the state had "botched" it.³⁰ In October, IDOC changed its protocol to let staff place a central IV line.¹⁶
14. 2025On March 12, Governor Brad Little signed a law making the firing squad Idaho's primary method of execution from July 1, 2026.¹⁶ In July, the State Police moved death in custody reporting to an online portal, and the share of agencies filing quarterly reports rose to 82.5%.³ Christopher Pendleton, 38, died at Saguaro Correctional Center on August 20; IDOC said he had been assaulted that morning.³¹ In December, Milo Warnock's family sued IDOC in federal court. The lawsuit says no officer made the required safety checks for more than an hour while he was attacked, and the family's lawyers say both Warnock and his cellmate had warned staff and asked to be separated.³²
15. 2026In March, IDOC said it had moved 120 people to Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex and would move 200 more, to relieve crowding in its prisons.² Adam Dees, 33, died at Saguaro Correctional Center on May 23; the Pinal County medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.²⁶ House Bill 803, passed in 2026, shielded parts of the execution procedure from review, and the firing squad became the primary method on July 1.³³ In September, a 66-year-old man died at the Idaho State Correctional Center after what IDOC officials said was an assault; the Idaho Statesman counted his death as the department's 12th in custody that year.³⁴

How far the official numbers can be trusted

No one counts every jail death in Idaho. InvestigateWest found in October 2024 that counties had voluntarily reported 32 jail deaths to the State Police since 2019, that the state's records held no jail death at all for 2022, though a 52-year-old woman died in the Boundary County Jail that October, and that county officials had made no public statement about 6 of the 13 jail deaths reported to the state in the previous year and a half. Some reports described what happened in less than one sentence.⁵ Kootenai County issued no public notice when Gary Neff, 43, died in its jail; a captain there told InvestigateWest, "we're not required by any statute or anything to tell anybody."⁵

The federal collection depends on agencies choosing to report. From 2020 to mid-2025, the share of agencies filing their quarterly reports ranged from 9% to 64%, and in mid-2023 almost half filed nothing, including 16 sheriff's offices and 3 juvenile detention agencies. Many agencies that do report a death do not file the reports confirming quarters without one, and the State Police has written that it struggled to get details of the circumstances of deaths from "a state agency," which it did not name.⁷³

IDOC's own death list gives the cause as "Unknown" for 41 of the 63 people who died in its custody in 2020 and 2021.¹¹ The yearly totals Idaho reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics count at least 290 people who died in its prisons from 2001 through 2019, at least 39 of them by suicide, and differ from the department's later list by up to two deaths a year.³⁵¹¹