At least 2,971 people have died in custody in North Carolina

How deaths in custody are reported in North Carolina

In North Carolina the sheriff of each county runs its jail. In 2018 the state counted 110 jails and three district jails that serve more than one county, from jails that hold eight people to the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, built for 1,904.¹ The Department of Adult Correction, part of the Department of Public Safety until it became a separate cabinet agency on January 1, 2023, runs the state's prisons, and juvenile justice stayed with the Department of Public Safety.² The department lists 54 prisons holding about 32,000 people.³ The Department of Public Safety's juvenile detention centers report deaths to the state for federal purposes along with prisons, sheriffs and police.⁴

State law requires a jail to notify the medical examiner and the coroner at once when a person in its custody dies, wherever the person is when they die, and requires the jail administrator to file a written report within five days with the local health director and the Secretary of Health and Human Services.⁵ The report, on a state form, gives the person's name, date of birth, race and sex, the place, date and time of death, the apparent manner of death, and the time of the last documented supervision round before the person was found.⁶ The Jails and Detention Unit of the Division of Health Service Regulation, within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), inspects every jail twice a year and reviews each death reported to it. Until 2018 the law required a report only when the person died inside the jail; for deaths elsewhere, the unit reviewed a death only when it learned of it and suspected problems with the person's care or supervision in the jail.⁷¹ DHHS has tracked jail deaths since 1997.⁸ It publishes no list or yearly count. Its figures reach the public in presentations to legislators, such as a 2017 list naming the people who died in jails from 2015 to 2017, and through reporters' records requests.⁹¹⁰

I have found no list of deaths published by the Department of Adult Correction. The department sends the state's federal death reports through the Governor's Crime Commission.⁴ Records the state released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project name at least 2,076 people who died in its prisons from 2005 through 2024, with the prison and date but no cause of death.¹¹

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Criminal Justice Analysis Center of the Governor's Crime Commission collects the reports. Its plan says the state has 94 jails and more than 500 law enforcement agencies; to find deaths that go unreported, staff get autopsy reports from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, set Google alerts for news of deaths involving officers, and check The Washington Post's database of police shootings.¹² The center has published one annual report, for 2022. It counted 186 deaths: the Department of Adult Correction reported 114 people who died in its custody, 64 of them in hospitals or other medical facilities, and 46 police departments, sheriffs and state agencies reported 72, among them 31 people shot by officers and 28 people held in jails.⁴ In 2021 the Department of Public Safety refused to release the individual death reports, and the U.S. Department of Justice agreed that federal law kept them confidential.¹³

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹⁴ Its list for 2003 to 2017 records at least five people held for ICE who died at the federal prison at Butner, all of them Cuban, from 2004 to 2010.¹⁵

What has changed

1. 1902On June 11, a white mob of more than fifty men took Harrison Gillespie, 13, and James Gillespie, 11, from the Rowan County jail in Salisbury and lynched them before a crowd of more than 400 people.¹⁶¹⁷
2. 1906On August 6, a crowd of about 2,000 white people went past the guards at the Rowan County jail in Salisbury and took Jack Dillingham, Nease Gillespie, 55, and his son John Gillespie, 14 or 15. They hanged the three men from a tree at Long and Henderson Streets and shot their bodies repeatedly. The soldiers a judge had called in to guard the jail did little to stop them.¹⁸¹⁷¹⁶
3. 1910-1961The state took executions over from the counties in 1910 and carried them out at Central Prison in Raleigh, in the electric chair and, from 1936, in a gas chamber.¹⁹ The department's lists name at least 362 people executed from 1910 to 1961; at least 282 of them were Black.²⁰ North Carolina executed at least 784 people before 1976.²¹
4. 1984-2006North Carolina executed at least 43 more people, from James Hutchins in March 1984 to Samuel Flippen in August 2006, all but two by lethal injection.²²¹⁹
5. 1994David Lawson died in the gas chamber at Central Prison on June 15, the first person in 30 years to die by lethal gas in North Carolina.¹⁹ He had refused to ask for lethal injection; reporters wrote that he felt doing so would amount to suicide. Witnesses said he choked and gasped as the cyanide gas filled his lungs, tried to stand, and screamed and pleaded for his life, crying "I am human."²³
6. 2003Henry Lee Hunt, 58, a Lumbee man, was executed on September 12, the first American Indian executed in North Carolina since 1977. He said he was innocent. At his clemency hearing his sister said he had an alibi, and his lawyer said a co-defendant had signed an affidavit before dying in prison saying he, not Hunt, had committed the crimes, and that Hunt had passed two lie detector tests. The state Commission of Indian Affairs asked the governor for clemency.²⁴²⁵
7. 2006-2013After August 2006 executions stopped, held up by lawsuits over the state's lethal injection procedure and a court fight over whether doctors and other medical professionals could take part.²⁶ The Racial Justice Act of 2009 let people on death row challenge their sentences with statistical evidence of racial bias. The legislature repealed it in 2013. The North Carolina Supreme Court in 2015 vacated the life sentences that four men had won under it, and in 2020 restored three of them.²¹
8. 2014Officers found Michael Anthony Kerr, 54, an Army veteran with schizoaffective disorder, dead on March 12 after they took him from Alexander Correctional Institution to Central Prison in Raleigh. He died of dehydration. He had spent 35 days in solitary confinement and the last five handcuffed; staff had cut off his milk four days before, and other prisoners said he lay in his own waste for days. More than two dozen employees resigned or were disciplined, and nine were fired; no one was charged with a crime. In 2015 the state agreed to pay his family $2.5 million.²⁷²⁸ On September 3, Henry McCollum, who had spent 30 years on death row, and his half-brother Leon Brown, both intellectually disabled, were freed on evidence uncovered by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. They had been 19 and 15 when they signed confessions they said they did not understand. In June 2015 the governor granted both of them pardons of innocence.²⁹²¹
9. 2017Uniece "Niecey" Fennell, 17, died by suicide on March 23 in the Durham County jail, where she was held among adults. In 2019 the county agreed to stop holding children with adults, remove suicide hazards from the jail and pay her mother $650,000.³⁰³¹ Michele Smiley, 34, a mother of six, died on October 6, the day she was taken to the Buncombe County jail. Her family's lawsuit said she told staff she was "burning up from the inside out" and had swallowed a large amount of methamphetamine, that a nurse did nothing to treat her, and that no one called emergency services while she rolled on the floor of a cell alone for nearly an hour. The county agreed to pay $2 million.³²³³⁹ The News & Observer's series "Jailed to Death" found that over five years at least 51 people had died in county jails after poor supervision, and that some deaths went unreported because jails did not have to report a death outside the jail.³⁴
10. 2018The legislature required jails to report a death of a person in their custody wherever it happened, including in a hospital, but not the death of a person a judge had released from custody.⁵¹⁰
11. 2019John Neville, 56, died on December 4, two days after officers at the Forsyth County jail held him face down with his legs pulled up toward his wrists for 19 minutes while he said again and again "I can't breathe." The medical examiner found that positional and compressional asphyxia had caused a heart attack and a brain injury. A grand jury declined to indict the officers. In 2022 the county and the sheriff agreed to pay his family $3 million, and the sheriff banned prone restraint.³⁵
12. 2020At least 56 people died in North Carolina's jails, a record, and at least 21 of them died by suicide.³⁶ In July, Governor Roy Cooper vetoed a bill, requested by DHHS, that would have kept police records of deaths in custody confidential even after they reached the medical examiner.³⁷ Desmond W., 17, died by suicide on November 21 at the juvenile detention center in Mecklenburg County's Jail North, a day after he arrived; the State Bureau of Investigation looked into whether officers had made the required checks.³⁸
13. 2022At least 90 people died in or after leaving the custody of North Carolina's jails, 77 of them in custody, the most since DHHS began counting.¹⁰ In December, Disability Rights North Carolina reported that 41 of the state's 109 jails had failed every state inspection from 2017 to 2019, that DHHS had approved 99% of the jails' plans to correct problems, and that no jail had been closed for its repeated failures. It found that officers at the Rowan County jail had missed safety rounds before Byron Bradshaw died there in 2017, and again before James Rife and Julie Beach died of overdoses two weeks apart in 2019, while the jail held more people than it was built for.³⁹
14. 2023At least 63 people died in or after leaving the custody of the jails, 46 of them in custody. DHHS found failures of supervision in at least 19 of the 46 deaths. Reggie Monroe, 28, died of a fentanyl overdose in the Wilson County jail after no one checked on him for at least two hours.¹⁰
15. 2024On December 31, Governor Cooper commuted the death sentences of 15 of the 136 people on death row. Among the things his office weighed were credible claims of innocence, possible racial influence, the person's mental and intellectual state, their age at the time of the crime, and the quality of their lawyers.⁴⁰
16. 2025On October 3, Governor Josh Stein signed a law that allows execution by another method used elsewhere in the United States if lethal injection is unavailable. He called that part of the law "barbaric" and said there would be no firing squads while he was governor.⁴¹ DHHS records show that at least 81 people died in the custody of the jails during the year, 64 of them inside a jail, and that at least 12 of the deaths in jails were suicides.⁴²
17. 2026On February 9, Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden told a legislative oversight committee that about 21 people had died in his jail since he took office in 2018. A legislator said state inspection reports had found that officers falsified or skipped required safety rounds before four of the five deaths in the jail in 2022, and McFadden said he was aware of that finding.⁴³

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The state's two counts of jail deaths do not agree. DHHS counted 77 people who died in the custody of jails in 2022.¹⁰ For the same year, the Criminal Justice Analysis Center's report under the federal law counted 28 people who died while held in jails.⁴ DHHS also leaves people out of its review: it generally does not investigate the deaths of people released from custody shortly before they die, often people who became gravely ill in jail, except for suicides. At least 17 such deaths in 2023 fell outside its investigations.¹⁰

The supervision records that DHHS relies on can be false. Disability Rights North Carolina found jails falsifying records to pass inspection with no consequences.³⁹ In Davidson County, video showed an officer logging a check at Curtis Watts's cell without looking in on him before he died by suicide.¹⁰ What happened in a death is hard to learn: DHHS death reviews are often heavily redacted, and State Bureau of Investigation files are exempt from the public records law.³⁶

The prison counts agree more closely. The yearly totals North Carolina gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2005 through 2019 match, within one death, the department's records released to UCLA; the federal tables count at least 1,724 people who died in the state's prisons from 2001 through 2019, at least 68 of them by suicide.⁴⁴¹¹ Causes come late: in the 2022 federal report, 22% of the deaths in the department's custody were still listed as under investigation.⁴