At least 2,101 people have died in custody in Virginia

How deaths in custody are reported in Virginia

The Virginia Department of Corrections runs 36 state prisons and other adult facilities. Sheriffs and regional jail authorities run 52 local and regional jails. The Department of Juvenile Justice runs one juvenile correctional center, and localities run 23 juvenile detention centers.¹ State law requires anyone who learns of a death in a jail, prison or police custody to notify the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which must investigate the cause and manner of death.²

Since 2024, under House Bill 611, sponsored by Delegate Cia Price, and Code of Virginia § 9.1-192.1, every police department, sheriff's office, prison and juvenile facility must report each death in its custody to the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), and every local and regional jail must report to the State Board of Local and Regional Jails. The report must give the person's name, gender, race, ethnicity and age, the date, time and place of death, the agency that held the person, and a brief description of the circumstances and the cause. DCJS must analyze the reports and make recommendations by July 1 each year.¹³⁴ DCJS's first report counted 194 deaths in custody in 2024, a figure it later raised to 205. Its second counted 216 in 2025: 111 in state prisons, 58 in local and regional jails, 47 in police custody and none in juvenile facilities.³¹ The reports count deaths by agency type, gender, race, age and manner of death, and name no one.¹

Every jail must notify the Board of Local and Regional Jails of a death within 24 hours. The Board's two jail death investigators obtain the autopsy report from the medical examiner and the jail's records, medical files, grievances and video, and present each death to the Board's Jail Review Committee, which recommends closing the case with or without a finding that the jail broke state standards, or taking the jail to adjudication. The Board reports its findings to the governor and publishes a yearly report: jails reported 51 deaths in 2023, 48 in 2024 and 58 in 2025.⁵ The General Assembly gave the Board, then called the Board of Corrections, the power to review every jail death in 2017, after Jamycheal Mitchell died in the Hampton Roads Regional Jail.⁶⁷ The committee discusses the deaths in closed session, and its minutes identify each death only by case number.⁸

Since July 1, 2024, the Office of the State Inspector General has had a Corrections Ombudsman Unit that takes complaints from people in state prisons and their families and inspects the prisons. Its annual report must summarize the deaths of incarcerated people and staff at each facility.⁹¹⁰

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) holds people at the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green and the Farmville Detention Center.¹¹ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹² Its list for 2003 through mid-2017 names at least four people who died after being held at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville or the Farmville Detention Center.¹³

What has changed

1. 1893On September 21, Roanoke police took Thomas Smith, a young Black man, out of the city jail for a few hours and handed him to a crowd of thousands gathered there, though the law required them to protect him. The crowd hanged him from a hickory tree, shot his body and burned it before thousands of people. No one was ever held to account.¹⁴
2. 1926-1928On the night of August 15, 1926, a crowd forced its way into the Wythe County jail in Wytheville, overpowered the jailer, broke into Raymond Arthur Byrd's cell and beat and shot him in the hallway. They dragged his body behind a car and hanged it from a tree. On March 14, 1928, Governor Harry F. Byrd Sr. signed the first state law to make lynching a state crime.¹⁵
3. 1608-1976Virginia has executed more people than any other state. It hanged people for 300 years, began electrocuting them in 1908 and hanged someone for the last time on April 9, 1909. Before 1976 it executed at least 1,277 people. From 1900 until 1977, it executed at least 73 Black men for offenses in which no one was killed, and no white man for those offenses.¹⁶
4. 1951On February 2 and 5, Virginia executed the Martinsville Seven: Frank Hairston Jr., Booker T. Millner, Francis DeSales Grayson, Howard Lee Hairston, James Luther Hairston, Joe Henry Hampton and John Claybon Taylor, Black men aged 18 to 37. None had a lawyer present when police questioned them, some could not read the confessions they signed, and all-white male juries convicted them in trials that lasted less than a day each. Historians believe at least five of them were innocent.¹⁶¹⁷
5. 1982-2017Virginia executed at least 113 more people, from August 10, 1982 to July 6, 2017.¹⁶¹⁸ It carried out a higher share of its death sentences than any other state. The Death Penalty Information Center attributes that to poor defense lawyering and the country's harshest procedural rules, under which courts refused to hear any claim a lawyer had failed to raise in time, even when the person facing execution was not at fault.¹⁶
6. 1990On October 17, the state electrocuted Wilbert Lee Evans.¹⁸ Three reporters who watched wrote that after the first surge of electricity he bled from his eyes, mouth and nose. The prison's own audio recording of the execution notes a first and second surge and says nothing of the bleeding.¹⁹
7. 1993-2001DNA tests excluded Earl Washington, a man with an IQ of 69 who had come within nine days of execution and whom police said had confessed. Governor L. Douglas Wilder commuted his death sentence to life in prison, Governor Jim Gilmore pardoned him in October 2000, and he was released in February 2001.²⁰¹⁶
8. 1997On July 23, Virginia executed Joseph O'Dell, 55, who said to the end that he was innocent. A prosecution witness who had testified that O'Dell confessed to him later signed an affidavit saying he had lied; DNA tests done for the defense contradicted the prosecution's blood evidence; and the jury that sentenced him was never told he would not be eligible for parole if they spared him. The U.S. Supreme Court refused, 5 to 4, to give him a new sentencing hearing, and an hour before the execution refused to stay it for new DNA tests.²¹²²
9. 1998-2000Virginia executed three people for acts they were accused of committing as children under 18: Dwayne Allen Wright on October 14, 1998, Douglas Christopher Thomas on January 10, 2000, and Steve Roach on January 13, 2000.¹⁸²³ Human Rights Watch pointed out that international law forbids the death penalty for anyone under 18 at the time of the offense.²³
10. 1999On April 7, seven guards at the Oak Ridge Juvenile Correctional Center in Richmond held down Wallace Dandridge, 16, who had an IQ of 59 and was on suicide watch, and left him handcuffed and strapped face down to a bunk. A state trooper found him unconscious about 45 minutes later, and he died at a hospital. The medical examiner ruled the death an accident caused by a heart arrhythmia brought on by stress and acute asphyxia. No one was charged, and in 2001 the state agreed to pay his family $1.2 million.²⁴
11. 2002In Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court barred the execution of people with intellectual disabilities.¹⁶
12. 2010In September, Virginia executed Teresa Lewis. The ACLU of Virginia had asked Governor Bob McDonnell to spare her, citing her IQ of 72 and the Atkins ruling; both of her co-defendants received life sentences.²⁵¹⁸
13. 2015-2016Jamycheal Mitchell, 24, who had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, died in the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth on August 19, 2015. A May court order to send him to a state hospital for treatment sat unsent for more than two months, after a hospital admissions worker put it in a drawer. His family's lawsuit said his weight fell from more than 180 pounds to 144 in about 100 days, alone in a cell with no water, mattress or blanket, and that staff denied him his medication and pepper-sprayed and kicked him. A federal judge wrote that he died "amid his own feces and bodily fluids" of "wasting syndrome."²⁶ Henry Clay Stewart Jr., 60, died in the same jail on August 6, 2016, two days after he filed an emergency grievance saying he had blacked out twice in less than 24 hours; a nurse rejected it. The jail and its medical contractor paid his estate $625,000 in 2018 and denied liability.²⁷
14. 2017A law in force from July 1 gave the Board of Corrections the power to review every death in a local or regional jail. Its first investigator started work in November.⁶ On July 6, Virginia executed William Morva. The jurors had been told he had a personality disorder; his lawyers said he was later diagnosed with delusional disorder, a more severe illness, and two United Nations human rights experts urged the state to annul his death sentence. Governor Terry McAuliffe let the execution go ahead.²⁸
15. 2018On December 19, the U.S. Department of Justice found reasonable cause to believe that the Hampton Roads Regional Jail denied the people held there constitutionally adequate medical and mental health care and kept people with serious mental illness in prolonged isolation, in violation of the Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act.²⁹
16. 2019On January 2, U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon found that the Department of Corrections had broken the 2016 settlement of Scott v. Clarke, a class action over medical care at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, and ordered it to comply. Deanna Niece died on her cell floor at Fluvanna on July 25, 2017, days from her release; the nurses who walked to her cell brought no equipment, and no stretcher or oxygen was at hand, as when Carolyn Liberato died there four days earlier. "Some women have died along the way," he wrote.³⁰ On March 19, the jail, its medical contractor NaphCare and the state agreed to pay Jamycheal Mitchell's family $3 million, admitting no wrongdoing.²⁶ The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found that the Board of Corrections had 24 jail deaths still under review in May, on average 14 months after the person died.³¹
17. 2020In January, the Board of Corrections, reviewing three deaths at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in 2018 and 2019, told the jail that its response to requests for records was "wholly inadequate."³² The General Assembly renamed the board the State Board of Local and Regional Jails.³³ In early August, James Hill, 72, a Canadian held by ICE at the Farmville Detention Center, died at Lynchburg General Hospital after testing positive for COVID-19. The outbreak at Farmville began after ICE transferred 74 people there from Florida and Arizona, 51 of whom had the virus; by August about three-quarters of the people held there had tested positive.³⁴³⁵
18. 2021On March 24, Governor Ralph Northam signed the law abolishing the death penalty, making Virginia the first Southern state to do so, and commuting the sentences of the two people left on death row.¹⁶ On August 31, he pardoned the Martinsville Seven, saying they had been tried without adequate due process and given a racially biased sentence not applied to white defendants.¹⁷
19. 2023Irvo Otieno, 28, died on March 6 at Central State Hospital in Dinwiddie County. Henrico County sheriff's deputies, who had held him in the county jail since police took him into custody under an emergency custody order on March 3, brought him there, and deputies and hospital workers pinned him, handcuffed, to the floor for about 11 minutes. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by asphyxia.³⁶³⁷ In September, the state, Henrico County and its sheriff agreed to pay his family $8.5 million, admitting no liability.³⁶
20. 2024Ten people, among them seven Henrico deputies, had been charged with second-degree murder in Irvo Otieno's death. The Dinwiddie County prosecutor dropped the charges against five deputies in May; a jury acquitted a hospital worker in October; and in November the prosecutor dropped the charges against the last two deputies.³⁷³⁸ House Bill 611 required every agency to report deaths in custody to the state, and a new law required an autopsy after every death in a state prison.³³⁹
21. 2025Aubrey McKay, 27, died on June 4 at Wallens Ridge State Prison in Wise County, weeks before his release. His mother said his body showed head trauma, black eyes, bruises from handcuffs and shackles, and a fractured Adam's apple.⁴⁰⁴¹ In December, the Inspector General reported that at least 67 people held at Greensville Correctional Center, the state's largest prison, had died in three years, 35 of them at the prison; for 18 of them, the medical examiner had not yet determined a cause.⁴²
22. 2026The medical examiner ruled Aubrey McKay's death a homicide by asphyxia. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that the department had fired a sergeant in connection with his death, and at Governor Abigail Spanberger's request the Attorney General's office took over the criminal investigation.⁴⁰⁴¹ DCJS reported that at least 111 people died in state prisons in 2025, up from 97 in 2024.¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Three state agencies count deaths in Virginia's prisons, and their counts disagreed in eight of the ten years to 2026. For 2022, the Department of Corrections counted 92 deaths, DCJS 85 and the medical examiner 66.³⁹ A 2024 law requires an autopsy after every death in a state prison, and the medical examiner's office has not met it.³⁹ For 49 of the 111 people who died in state prisons in 2025, DCJS listed the manner of death as unavailable, pending investigation; the department was waiting for the medical examiner's reports.¹

DCJS's own counts change after publication. It first counted 194 deaths in custody in 2024, then added 11 deaths in police custody it had found in other records.¹ During 2024 it found 22 deaths that agencies had not reported because they did not know the deaths counted, and 21 agencies sent it no data at all. Comparing its new system with the medical examiner and news records it used before 2024, it found 33 deaths that only the old method caught and 20 that only the new one did.³ From 2020 to 2023, Virginia twice failed to send the federal government its death-in-custody data.⁴ The implementation plan the state gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance still contains a staff member's draft note: "I don't think we have a formal process for this," about tracking deaths still under investigation.²

The jail counts shift too. The Board of Local and Regional Jails' report for 2023 counted 50 deaths in jails that year, 17 of them suicides; its report for 2025 gives 51 deaths and 18 suicides for the same year.⁴³⁵ The Board does not review the deaths of people a jail released from custody after sending them to a hospital, at least 10 people from 2023 through 2025.⁵ In 2025, it found that jails had broken state standards in 14 of the 47 death reviews it closed, most often the rule on supervising the people held.⁵

The federal tables count at least 1,676 people who died in Virginia's prisons from 2001 through 2019, at least 65 of them by suicide and at least 15 by homicide.⁴⁴ The ombudsman's report for fiscal 2025 summarizes deaths only at the twelve prisons the unit inspected, at least 20 people; Wallens Ridge, where Aubrey McKay died that June, was not among them.¹⁰⁴¹