At least 391 people have died in custody in Nebraska

How deaths in custody are reported in Nebraska

Every death of a person being apprehended by, or in the custody of, a law enforcement officer or detention staff in Nebraska must go to a grand jury. Once the county coroner certifies the death, the district court must call a grand jury, normally within 30 days, and a team of three homicide investigators, at least two of them from outside the agency involved, examines the evidence for the county attorney.¹ If the grand jury returns no true bill, the transcript and exhibits are open to public review on written request to the clerk of the district court, though no copies may be made.² Grand juries in Douglas County hear these deaths in batches: one in September 2023 returned no true bill in 14 deaths in custody.³ The grand jury looks only for crimes; the Legislature's Inspector General of the Nebraska Correctional System notes that it does not examine the agency's response or wider problems, and that the 30-day deadline is regularly extended.⁴

The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (NDCS) runs the state prisons. It posts press releases on deaths in its custody that name the person, giving age and place, and stating that a grand jury will investigate.⁵ It must report every death and serious injury of a person in its custody to the Inspector General, which it does within a day or two, and the Inspector General must investigate each one.⁴ The office, created by the Legislature in 2015, publishes yearly death counts and reports on its investigations.⁴⁶ NDCS's own quarterly data sheets count deaths only as one type of release from prison, without names or causes.⁷

No state agency publishes deaths in Nebraska's county jails, and the Inspector General has no oversight of them.⁴ For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Nebraska Crime Commission's Statistical Analysis Center has collected quarterly reports from law enforcement agencies and jails since January 1, 2020,⁸ and its web page about that work gives no figures.⁸ No state law requires agencies to report; the commission makes it a condition of accreditation. In 2022, 86 percent of the state's agencies reported, and most of those that did not were small towns and county sheriff's offices.⁹ Jail deaths become public mainly when a sheriff or the Nebraska State Patrol announces them; a county attorney may ask the State Patrol to conduct the grand jury investigation.¹⁰

Deaths of young people in the Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Centers, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, and in juvenile detention centers are reported to a separate office, the Inspector General of Nebraska Child Welfare.⁴

Since November 3, 2025, the state has held people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Work Ethic Camp in McCook, a former state prison program site that NDCS continues to run.¹¹¹² County jails have also held people for ICE: Moises Tino-Lopez, 23, held at the Hall County Department of Corrections, died at St. Francis Hospital in Grand Island on September 27, 2016.¹³ ICE, not the state, reports deaths in its custody, and Congress requires it to publish a report on each within 90 days.¹⁴

What has changed

1. 1919On September 28, a crowd of about 4,000 set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha and took Will Brown from the courthouse jail. He was beaten to death and his body was hanged, shot and burned.¹⁵
2. 2015During an uprising at the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution on May 10 and 11, two men held there were found dead.¹⁶ The same year the Legislature created the Office of Inspector General of the Nebraska Correctional System⁴ and repealed the death penalty over the governor's veto; voters restored it in 2016.¹⁷
3. 2016Moises Tino-Lopez died in ICE custody after being held at the Hall County jail.¹³
4. 2017A man was strangled by his cellmate in a double-bunked restrictive housing cell at Tecumseh, and the Inspector General reported on his death.¹⁸
5. 2018Nebraska executed Carey Dean Moore, its fourth execution since 1976. The state carried out 34 executions before 1976.¹⁷
6. 2020The Crime Commission began collecting reports of deaths in jails, prisons and police custody for the federal government.⁸ From 2020 through 2023, 101 people died in NDCS custody.⁶
7. 2023A Douglas County grand jury returned no true bill in 14 deaths in custody.³
8. August 2024The Inspector General reported on three suicides in state prisons from December 2021 to June 2023. Two people had hanged themselves from the upper bunk in cells where an internal review had recommended removing the second bunk in 2016, and none of the department's own reviews of the three deaths interviewed other incarcerated people.¹⁹
9. November 2024The Inspector General reported on a 2022 death in a double-bunked restrictive housing cell at the Nebraska State Penitentiary and recommended that the department stop double-bunking in restrictive housing.¹⁸
10. 2025NDCS became required to report deaths of people on parole to the Inspector General.⁴ In November the McCook Work Ethic Camp began holding people for ICE.¹²
11. 2026The Inspector General found that as many as half of the roughly two dozen people who die in NDCS custody each year appeared to have been eligible for medical parole, and that a lack of housing and long-term care left eligible people dying in prison.²⁰ For the year to June 2026 the office counted 12 deaths in custody, the fewest in at least five years.⁴

How far the official numbers can be trusted

For state prisons, the Inspector General's counts rest on what NDCS reports, and the office calls the department diligent in reporting deaths.⁴ Its investigations are limited in other ways. NDCS will not share a dead person's medical records with the office without written consent from the person's estate, even if the person consented while alive,⁶ the office has no staff with medical expertise, and the deaths it investigates are rarely examined by outside medical experts or through autopsies.⁴ The department did not give the office the psychological autopsies its own policy requires after suicides.¹⁹

Different public series cover different periods. The Inspector General counted calendar years until 2024⁶ and fiscal years from July to June after that,⁴ while the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics published NDCS's own yearly counts for 2001 through 2019.²¹

For county jails, police lockups and juvenile detention there is no public count at all. The only statewide record is what agencies send the Crime Commission for federal reporting, which the commission does not publish and which some small agencies do not send.⁸⁹