At least 438 people have died in custody in Minnesota

How deaths in custody are reported in Minnesota

The Minnesota Department of Corrections runs 11 state prisons and licenses the jails and other local correctional facilities run by counties and cities.¹ One of its prisons, the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Red Wing, is the state's only juvenile corrections facility.² Since 2021, Minnesota Statutes section 241.021 has required the administrator of every prison and licensed facility to report to the commissioner of corrections, within 24 hours, the death of anyone committed to the facility's custody, including a death after the person was taken out for medical care.³ The same law requires the department to report to the Legislature by February 15 each year.¹ Its yearly Health and Safety in Correctional Facilities report lists deaths and suicides by prison and by licensed facility, with each person's sex, race and age group. It gives no names, no dates of death, and no cause of death other than suicide.¹

Each facility must review a death within 90 days, with a medical expert who did not treat the person, and tell the department through its detention information system that the review is done. Any report or document made for the review is confidential under the statute.³ Deaths in the prisons are investigated by the department's Office of Special Investigations.⁴ The department does not investigate jail deaths; it reviews whether the jail complied with state standards.⁵ The Office of the Ombuds for Corrections reviews deaths and near-fatal incidents in the 11 prisons and about 150 local facilities. Its 2025 annual report says unexpected and preventable deaths continue to rise, and gives no count of them.⁶

Minnesota has no law requiring every law enforcement agency to report deaths in custody to one agency, the state says in its plan for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act. For that reporting, the Office of Justice Programs in the Department of Public Safety receives a quarterly spreadsheet of deaths from the Department of Corrections and finds deaths involving police through news releases and Google searches. The office does not release identifiable data from these reports to the public.⁴

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds people in Minnesota county jails under agreements, among them the jails in Elk River (Sherburne County), Albert Lea (Freeborn County) and Willmar (Kandiyohi County).⁷ The department's jail counts do not say whether a person who died was held for ICE.¹ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.⁸ Its list for 2003 to 2017 includes Maria Inamagua-Mercha, who died on April 4, 2006, while held in the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center in St. Paul.⁹

What has changed

1. 1862On December 26, the federal government hanged 38 members of the Dakota nation, the largest mass execution in United States history.¹⁰
2. 1906On February 13, Minnesota hanged William Williams. The rope was too long, and he took fourteen and a half minutes to die. It was the state's last execution, and the outcry led to the abolition of the death penalty in 1911.¹⁰
3. 1920On June 15 in Duluth, a mob took Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie from jail and lynched them.¹¹
4. 2018Hardel Sherrell, 27, died on September 4 in the Beltrami County Jail. His mother, Del Shea Perry, told legislators that jail staff left him on the floor of his cell for hours at a time for nearly a week, believing he was faking illness.¹²¹³
5. 2021After a July 2020 KARE 11 investigation of deaths in county jails,¹² the Legislature passed the Hardel Sherrell Act. It set minimum standards for medical care, mental health, suicide prevention and death reviews in jails and prisons, and created the 24-hour death reporting rule and the yearly report to the Legislature.⁵¹ The first report covered August 1 to December 31, 2021.¹⁴
6. 2023In January, the department put the Beltrami County jail's license on conditional status and cut its capacity from 132 to 80, the first sanction under the Hardel Sherrell Act.¹⁵ In February, a federal judge ordered Beltrami County and its jail medical contractor, MEnD Correctional Care, to pay Hardel Sherrell's family $2.6 million.¹³
7. 2023Twenty people died in the custody of Minnesota county jails, up from 13 the year before, according to Department of Corrections data.⁵
8. 2024On October 19, staff at the juvenile facility in Red Wing found a young person unresponsive, and the youth was pronounced dead. The department released few details.¹⁶²
9. 2025The department's report counted 16 deaths in state prisons and 12 in licensed facilities; two of the 12 were suicides.¹⁷

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The yearly reports leave out the juvenile facility by design: every report since 2021 says that juvenile data from Red Wing is not captured in it.¹⁴¹⁷ The 2024 report lists no deaths at Red Wing, the year a youth died there.¹¹⁶ The first report, for August to December 2021, lists no prison deaths and notes 14 in the first seven months of the year, outside its period.¹⁴

The reports contain errors a reader can check. The 2022 report gives a total of 14 prison deaths, but its rows add up to 15.¹⁸ The 2024 and 2025 reports define age groups that do not match the age groups used in their own tables, and the 2025 report lists one person in the jail table as aged "36-35".¹¹⁷

For earlier years, the department's own death records disagree slightly with what it reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The records it released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars project list 12 prison deaths in 2012 and 7 each in 2017 and 2018;¹⁹ the Bureau counted 14, 6 and 6.²⁰

Because the reports carry no names or dates and death reviews are confidential, a reader cannot match the official counts to individual deaths.¹³ Names of people who died in jails come mostly from news reports, and the state's federal death reports are not released in a form that identifies anyone.⁴