At least 615 people have died in custody in West Virginia

How deaths in custody are reported in West Virginia

West Virginia has no law requiring deaths in custody to be reported, only a requirement that a county medical examiner or coroner investigate the death of anyone in state custody. The state says so in its own plan for federal reporting, which adds that no state website tracks these deaths and none is planned.¹ One agency holds almost everyone: the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, part of the Department of Homeland Security, runs the ten regional jails, the ten prisons, the community corrections centers and the ten juvenile facilities, and the state allows no private prisons.¹

The division announces no deaths and publishes no list of them.² Its records come out only through requests under the state Freedom of Information Act. A table it released in 2025 and 2026 lists each death from January 2020 with the date, facility, age, sex, race, manner and cause, and whether the person had been convicted or was awaiting trial, but no name.³ An earlier release covers deaths in the regional jails from 2009.⁴ The division does not release the names of the people who died; reporters and the public have to find them on their own.²

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Office of Research and Strategic Planning of Justice and Community Services collects a form the corrections division fills out after each death, checks it every quarter against the division's offender records, adds death certificates from Vital Statistics and uploads the data to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. When the plan was written, no data was being collected from the state's 235 police agencies, 196 of which have temporary holding areas, or from the juvenile facilities, and there was no statewide system for reporting deaths in police custody.¹

The fullest public record is the Quantez Burks Report, which the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy built from the division's records and updates each month, adding the names it has found itself.⁵⁶ It counted at least 344 people who died in West Virginia jails, prisons and community corrections centers from 2020 through 2025: 210 in prisons, 126 in jails and 8 in community corrections. One in four had not been convicted and was awaiting trial, and more than half of those had been held ten days or less.⁶

In 2025 the regional jails rented beds to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: South Central Regional Jail in Charleston, Northern Regional Jail in Moundsville and Eastern Regional Jail in Martinsburg held people for ICE at $90 a day.⁷ In March 2026 the division stopped accepting immigration detainees after a federal court ordered a man held at South Central Regional Jail released.⁸ ICE, not the state, publishes reports on deaths in its custody.⁹

What has changed

1. 1899–1965Executions became a state responsibility in 1899. The state executed 94 men from then until April 3, 1959, and abolished the death penalty in 1965.¹⁰
2. 2018James Bulger, 89, who used a wheelchair, was killed at the federal penitentiary at Hazelton on October 30, less than 12 hours after he arrived. The U.S. Justice Department's inspector general found serious management failures in the Bureau of Prisons' handling of his transfer.¹¹
3. 2019Zachary Bailey died in July, shortly after he was brought to North Central Regional Jail. His family was told he died of an overdose; at trial a doctor testified that he died of positional asphyxia, and guards admitted lying on top of him for minutes. The state paid $1 million to settle the case in 2024.¹²
4. 2021Drawing on Reuters data, the ACLU of West Virginia reported that 115 people died in the regional jails from 2008 to 2019, and that the death rate in the jails from 2009 to 2019 was about one and a half times the national rate.¹³
5. 2022Thirteen people died at Southern Regional Jail in Beaver.¹⁴ One of them, Quantez Burks, 37, was beaten by correctional officers in March while restrained and handcuffed in an interview room with no camera, a day after he arrived.¹⁵⁶ The state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide within weeks, but the division kept reporting it as a natural death from heart disease for nearly two years.⁶
6. 2023The state agreed in November to pay $4 million to settle a class action over conditions at Southern Regional Jail, two weeks after a federal magistrate judge recommended finding that the state had destroyed evidence, including investigations, emails between jail officials and grievances.¹⁴
7. 2024Marissa Crim, 31, died on August 4 after being held at North Central Regional Jail. A prosecutor's filing the next day said the jail had reported that she died in custody, but the division left her death off the list of deaths it released.²⁶
8. 2025Former officers at Southern Regional Jail were sentenced in the death of Quantez Burks; seven had been indicted. Two who pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate his civil rights were sentenced to 20 and 21 years, and a former lieutenant was sentenced to 17 and a half years for obstructing justice by helping cover up the death.¹⁵ The same year, the Center on Budget and Policy named its database for him, with his family's permission.⁵⁶
9. February 2025Asked for every public report of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General since July 2023, the department said it had found none.¹⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The division's counts are known to leave people out. Marissa Crim's death is not on them, although the request that produced them asked for people who died after being moved to a hospital or after an administrative release.² Its records of how people died have been wrong: Quantez Burks was listed as a natural death long after the medical examiner had ruled it a homicide.⁶

The division's own releases do not agree with each other. Its January 2024 release lists 96 deaths in the regional jails from 2009 through 2019,⁴ while the Reuters data used by the ACLU found 115 from 2008 through 2019.¹³ For prisons before 2020 the only yearly figures are those the state reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, which counted 394 deaths in West Virginia prisons from 2001 through 2019 and none in the regional jails, which it counts separately.¹⁷

Deaths in police custody and in the juvenile facilities were not being collected at all when the state wrote its federal reporting plan.¹ No official record anywhere names the people who died.²