At least 458 people have died in custody in Iowa

How deaths in custody are reported in Iowa

The Iowa Department of Corrections (IDOC) runs nine state prisons and keeps a database of the deaths in them and in the residential facilities run by the state's community corrections districts. Most of the deaths happen in the hospice units it runs in several prisons. The department has told federal officials that it posts a press release for every death in a state facility, typically within one business day.¹ The releases give the person's name and age, the prison, and the date and place of death.² Of Iowa's 99 county sheriffs, 96 run a jail.¹ A state rule requires every jail to notify IDOC's state jail inspection unit within 24 hours of any death,³ and another requires jailers to look in on each person at least once an hour, and at least every 30 minutes on anyone in physical jeopardy because of a physical or mental condition.⁴

A state rule requires the county medical examiner to order an autopsy after any death in a prison, jail or correctional institution or in police custody that no natural disease process accounts for, and police agencies must report deaths in custody to the Office of the State Medical Examiner. Autopsy reports are not public in Iowa. IDOC and most police agencies refer deaths that need a criminal investigation to the Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) of the Iowa Department of Public Safety.¹

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, part of the Department of Public Safety, reports Iowa's deaths in custody to the U.S. Department of Justice each quarter. Its main source is the State Medical Examiner, which searches its own database each quarter and shares the results under a data-sharing agreement. The office checks that list against IDOC's quarterly list of deaths, which IDOC began sharing in 2023, against IDOC and DCI press releases, and against Google searches for news reports. Because the agreement lets it pass the examiner's data only to the Department of Justice, the office has written that it cannot act as a source of death-in-custody data for the public.¹

The state's training school for boys is in Eldora.⁵ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has held people in Iowa county jails under contract. In 2021 the Hardin County Jail in Eldora had held people for ICE for two decades and was the largest immigration detention site in the state, and jails in Linn and Polk counties also held people for ICE.⁶ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody; neither those reports nor its list of deaths from October 2003 to June 2017 includes anyone who died in Iowa.⁷⁸

What has changed

1. 1845William and Steven Hodges, Mormon brothers, were hanged together on July 15. Both said until their deaths that they were innocent, and blamed the verdicts on anti-Mormon prejudice.⁹
2. 1870On the night of July 6, a crowd in Chariton broke open the Lucas County jail, took Hiram Wilson out and hanged him from a second-story window of the courthouse. No one was prosecuted.¹⁰
3. 1872-1878Governor Cyrus Carpenter signed a law abolishing the death penalty in 1872. Crowds lynched several people over the next six years, and in 1878 the legislature brought the death penalty back to end the lynchings.⁹
4. 1874Early on December 15, about 500 armed, masked men came to the Polk County jail in Des Moines. When their leader knocked, the jailer opened the door, thinking he was a policeman. The crowd rushed in, dragged Charles Howard out half-naked, hanged him from a lamppost in the courthouse yard and shot his body full of holes. Every attempt to find and prosecute the men failed.¹⁰
5. 1907On the night of January 9, a crowd of hundreds in Charles City cut the town's electric lights, battered down the doors of the Floyd County jail with a railroad rail and knocked the hinges off James Cullen's cell door with sledgehammers. When the crowd reached the jail, the sheriff was told to go to the courthouse and stay there, and he did. The crowd hanged Cullen from the Main Street bridge over the Cedar River. Attempts to prosecute its leaders failed.¹⁰¹¹
6. 1963Iowa, which executed at least 45 people before 1976,⁹ carried out its last execution on March 15, when Victor Feguer was hanged at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison under a federal death sentence. An appeal for clemency went to President John F. Kennedy, who refused it on February 22. It was the last federal execution until 2001.¹²
7. 1965Governor Harold Hughes signed the bill that abolished the death penalty a second time. Later attempts to restore it, including Governor Terry Branstad's in 1994, did not pass both houses of the legislature.⁹
8. 2008David Rodamaker died in December in a mental health unit of the Iowa State Penitentiary and was dead for about an hour before anyone found him. The prison fired two officers, Justin Woolever and one it did not name, for lying about how often they had checked on him; prison investigators said neither had completed all his rounds.¹³
9. 2020Ricky Christianson, 59, was booked into the Cerro Gordo County Jail on November 17 and told staff that he had life-threatening seizures and that the arresting officer had not let him bring his anti-seizure medication. The next morning he had a seizure, and jailers left him on the floor of a padded cell. Surveillance video showed that no one checked on him for 91 minutes; when staff finally did, he was dead. His children's lawsuit said jail logs misreported where he was held and the checks on him. In March 2022 the county settled for $3.5 million.¹⁴ The same year, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose ruled in a lawsuit brought in 2017 by students at the Boys State Training School in Eldora, with Disability Rights Iowa. She equated the school's restraint device, "the wrap," with torture, and ordered the state to remove it within 10 days, limit isolation, expand mental health care and accept a court monitor.⁵
10. 2022Malorie Hults, 31, died in March at the Linn County Correction Center. Her mother had called 911 hoping she would be taken to a hospital; she was taken to jail instead, and about eight hours after she was booked an officer found her on the floor of her cell, not breathing. In August 2025 the Linn County Board of Supervisors was set to approve an $850,000 settlement of her family's lawsuit against the sheriff and a jail nurse.¹⁵
11. 2024Malga Harun Yanga died at the Newton Correctional Facility on September 4. His estate's lawsuit says that he had been vomiting blood for days, so much that other prisoners had to clean it up, when nurse Penny Daniels saw him twice on September 3 and neither assessed him further nor asked for a doctor; that around 12:30 a.m. an officer refused his cellmate's plea for help, saying Yanga had already been to the clinic and "we're not taking him again"; and that officers found him unresponsive around 5 a.m. The Iowa Board of Nursing said he died of a perforated ulcer. By August 2026 the board had suspended the licenses of Daniels and of a second nurse, David Arterburn, who it said had not assessed or treated Yanga after colleagues told him Yanga was getting worse. The defendants deny wrongdoing.¹⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Iowa publishes no statewide count of deaths in custody. The federal reports rest mainly on medical examiner data that the Office of Drug Control Policy may share only with the Department of Justice. The office has written that its checks of other sources sometimes turn up deaths the examiner's list left out, and that the examiner, who reports voluntarily and without pay, sometimes misses the deadline.¹

The prison records are the most complete. IDOC's own list of deaths from 2005 through 2023, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, names at least 421 people who died in its prisons and community corrections facilities. It lists six people twice, on the same date at two different facilities, and gives no cause for any death before 2017.¹⁷ The yearly totals Iowa reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics count at least 306 people who died in its prisons from 2001 through 2019, at least 34 of them by suicide. For 2017 they count 16 deaths in the prisons, where the department's list, leaving out community corrections, has 13.¹⁸¹⁷

IDOC's press releases name each person who dies, but its website lists death releases only from May 2025 on. By those releases, at least 34 people died in IDOC custody from May 2025 through September 2026.¹⁹

Jail deaths are the hardest to count. In 2023 the Office of Drug Control Policy was looking into whether IowaVINE, the state's victim notification system, could supply data on deaths in county jails.¹ The 24-hour notice to the state jail inspector is not always given: in 2026 the Iowa Office of Ombudsman found that the Scott County Jail had not reported a woman's self-harm to the inspector within 24 hours, and made 12 recommendations, including on reporting to the inspector.²⁰