At least 225 people have died in custody in Montana

How deaths in custody are reported in Montana

The Montana Department of Corrections publishes a "Deaths In Custody" page listing each person who died in its custody that year, with the date of death, name, Department of Corrections number and the place of death. It gives no age, cause or manner of death, and it shows only the current year; earlier years drop off the page.¹ The page says that under state law a county coroner determines the cause, manner and circumstances of each death, and that the coroner's statement of cause appears on the death certificate, which is a public record.¹

State law requires a coroner's inquiry into every death that happens while a person is held in a prison, jail or detention facility, or while being taken into or held in police custody.² For a death in a prison, jail or other correctional facility that is not caused by a terminal illness under medical care, the county attorney must order a public inquest before a coroner's jury.³ Because most Montana counties combine the offices of sheriff and coroner, only the 15 counties with independently elected coroners could hold these inquests until 2023, when Senate Bill 68 let a sheriff-coroner from another county preside.⁴³

The department did not always publish deaths. It stopped issuing public notices of deaths in September 2019, calling them an informal practice; the Missoulian then found that 20 people had died in its custody over the next ten months, 15 of them in 2020.⁵ The department began listing deaths again in July 2020 after that reporting.⁶ It also offers an interactive "Mortality in Corrections" dashboard.⁷ In July 2026 the department held 591 people in Mississippi. By then 14 people had died in its custody that year, four of them at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility there, and all four deaths were under investigation.⁸

County jails, run by sheriffs, report deaths to no state agency that publishes them. For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Montana Board of Crime Control's Statistical Analysis Center gathers deaths from a quarterly Department of Corrections report, flagged death certificates from the state's Violent Death Reporting System, a quarterly jail-suicide report from the Office of Vital Statistics, the Division of Criminal Investigation and weekly monitoring of the news, then reports them to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. The board's plan says Montana has no website for this data, and that the department's quarterly report leaves out people on probation or parole who were not held in secure facilities.⁹ Since about 2011 the board has also kept its own database of deaths in local jails, built from news accounts and other sources; it is not published.¹⁰ The only published count of jail deaths is the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics series, which records 78 deaths in Montana jails from 2000 through 2019.¹¹

Jails on reservations run or overseen by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs report to no Montana agency. An NPR and Mountain West News Bureau investigation found at least 19 deaths in these jails nationwide from 2016 to 2021, among them Willy Pepion, 22, who died at the Blackfeet jail in Browning in May 2020; guards required to check on him every 30 minutes found him nearly three hours after he died.¹² A review commissioned by the Interior Department later found that staff had falsified records showing they had checked on him.¹³

What has changed

1. Before 1976Montana carried out 71 executions. Hanging remained a legal method until 1995, when lethal injection became the only one.¹⁴
2. 1976–2006Montana carried out three executions after 1976, the last by lethal injection in 2006.¹⁴
3. 2011The Montana Board of Crime Control told the Law and Justice Interim Committee that its staff had begun keeping a database of deaths in local jails from news accounts and other sources, and counted six such deaths that year.¹⁰
4. 2015A state district judge barred the use of pentobarbital in executions, and executions have been on hold since.¹⁴ The same year, Disability Rights Montana sued over the treatment of people with mental illness at Montana State Prison.¹⁵
5. September 2019The Department of Corrections stopped announcing deaths in its custody.⁵
6. July 2020After the Missoulian found 20 unannounced deaths, the department resumed listing deaths publicly, without causes.⁵⁶ The Billings Gazette's editorial board had called the silence "so antithetical to good government."¹⁶
7. 2021Two people died by suicide at Montana State Prison in September; the department's list of deaths did not say how anyone died.⁶
8. 2022Darryl Big Leggins, 55, died on February 10 at the Valley County Detention Center, where he was held under contract for the Department of Corrections.¹⁷ A coroner's jury found a year later that he died of natural causes.¹⁸ The prison lawsuit settled in March: the settlement limits solitary confinement for people with severe mental illness and requires an independent monitor. At least 12 people with severe mental illness at the prison died by suicide while the case was pending.¹⁵
9. 2023Senate Bill 68 allowed a sheriff-coroner from another county to preside over an inquest into a death in custody.⁴³ In the same year the Board of Crime Control set out its federal death-in-custody reporting plan, which states that Montana law and federal law do not differ in what they require.⁹
10. 2024Three people died within two weeks at the Cascade County Detention Center in Great Falls, from June 29 to July 10, each within days of being booked.¹⁹
11. 2026In May, advocates asked legislators for an independent corrections ombudsperson; Montana has none, while about 20 states have one in some form.²⁰ In July the department told legislators about the deaths in Mississippi.⁸ On September 1 the Law and Justice Interim Committee voted 5–4 to support a bill creating an independent ombudsperson for the Department of Corrections in the Governor's Office, for the 2027 session.²¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

For state prisons, the yearly totals Montana reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics come close to the department's own lists but do not always match. Federal figures give 13 deaths in 2015, 16 in 2016, 13 in 2017 and 5 in 2018;²² the department's death records for the same years, obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, list 16, 17, 15 and 6.²³ The department told legislators in 2026 that about 14 people a year had died in its custody over 15 years, among them 25 suicides, 2 homicides and 13 accidental deaths.⁸

The public list appears to leave out people held for the department outside its prisons. Of the 20 deaths the Missoulian found in 2019 and 2020, four were in prerelease or treatment centers.⁵ For 2021 the department's page listed 21 deaths,²⁴ while its records released to UCLA include 23 people, among them deaths at the Butte Prerelease Center and the Great Falls Transition Center that are not on the page.²³ Darryl Big Leggins, held for the department in a county jail, is on neither.¹⁷²⁴²³

Counts of jail deaths do not agree with each other. The Board of Crime Control counted six deaths in local jails in 2011 from news and other sources;¹⁰ the Bureau of Justice Statistics counted eight, from 34 to 41 reporting jail jurisdictions a year.¹¹ Neither the board's database nor its federal submissions are published, so the 78 jail deaths in the federal series from 2000 through 2019 cannot be matched to names.⁹¹¹ The department's list never gives a cause of death; for that a reader has to find the death certificate or the inquest.¹⁶