At least 197 people have died in custody in Wyoming

How deaths in custody are reported in Wyoming

The Wyoming Department of Corrections runs five adult prisons: the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington, the Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton, the Wyoming Honor Conservation Camp in Newcastle and the Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk.¹ It also holds people outside its own prisons. In the second quarter of 2026 it held 2,586 people, on average 170 of them out of state and 56 in county jails.² Its out-of-state placements include the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi.³⁴

The department posts a one-page press release for many of the deaths in its custody, giving the person's name, prison number, date and place of death and place of birth.⁴ The releases give no cause of death. Each says that under department policy an autopsy will be done, and that the department does not release protected health information.³ Its posted releases begin in 2021, and in 2024 it posted releases for four of the nine deaths on its own list of people who died in its custody that year.⁴⁵ The department's annual reports and quarterly population reports give no count of deaths.¹²

Wyoming has no state medical examiner. Each county elects a coroner, and the death of anyone held in a county or state corrections facility is a coroner's case by law, whether or not the death was expected.⁶ The state's 23 county jails are run by the elected sheriffs, and no state agency oversees them: Wyoming has no independent regulator of county jails and no law requiring sheriffs to take steps to prevent suicide.⁷ Sheriffs decide whether a death in their jail is investigated and by whom. By statute the Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), in the Office of the Attorney General, may investigate at the request of a county law enforcement official, and it confirmed that it had investigated 18 of the 34 deaths in county jails from 2012 to 2022.⁸

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, DCI collects reports itself. Its 2023 plan says that "there is no state law in Wyoming that addresses reporting." Each quarter it emails a Google Form to the 23 sheriff's offices, 55 city police departments, six state agencies and one juvenile facility, asking for each death's name, age, date and place, the agency involved and the manner of death, and it uses Google Alerts to learn of deaths no one reported. It sends the data to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance.⁹ DCI first asked agencies to report deaths to it in October 2019.¹⁰ I have found no state publication of these data.

Some county jails hold people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In July 2025, Natrona County began holding ICE detainees long-term in its jail in Casper, and Sweetwater and Uinta counties had similar contracts.¹¹ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹²

What has changed

1. 1881On March 22, a crowd took George Parrott from the jail in Rawlins and hanged him. No one claimed his body; two local doctors took it for study, and one of them, John Osborne, later governor of Wyoming, had shoes made from his skin.¹³
2. 1965On December 10, Andrew Pixley died in the gas chamber, the last execution in Wyoming for 26 years.¹⁴ Wyoming executed 22 people before 1976.¹⁵
3. 1992On January 22, Wyoming executed Mark Hopkinson by lethal injection at the Wyoming State Penitentiary, its only execution since 1976.¹⁴¹⁵ A bill to repeal the death penalty reached the full Senate in 2021 and was defeated.¹⁵
4. 2015Hunter Johnson, 19, died on December 26 after a suicide attempt in the Laramie County Detention Center in Cheyenne, about a week after he was arrested. His family sued the county and settled.⁷
5. 2019DCI told every law enforcement agency and the Department of Corrections to report deaths in custody to it, starting October 1, for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act.¹⁰
6. 2021–2022Three people died in the Albany County Detention Center in Laramie between September 2021 and April 2022, two of them Deran Vasquez and Michael Mora, by suicide. The sheriff announced none of the deaths; they became public in October 2022, when he was asked about them during his re-election campaign. Michael Mora's mother said she learned of her son's condition from a doctor in Colorado.¹⁶
7. 2022Kenneth Durrah, 35, died on December 1 after staff at the Campbell County Detention Center in Gillette held him face down and left him in a restraint chair, where he said he could not breathe.¹⁷¹⁸ DCI took about 15 months to finish its investigation, and in March 2024 a special prosecutor declined to charge any of the staff.¹⁸ WyoFile and the Gillette News Record obtained the jail video through a public records request.¹⁷
8. 2023WyoFile's "Dying in jail" series, built from records requests to all 23 sheriffs, reported 34 deaths in Wyoming county jails from 2012 to 2022, most of them suicides.¹⁹⁷ In September, Dennis Green died in a holding cell at the Campbell County Courthouse in Gillette.⁸ DCI adopted its plan for federal death-in-custody reporting.⁹
9. 2024The Department of Corrections posted press releases for four of the nine people who died in its custody during the year. Four of the nine died in prisons outside Wyoming, three of them in Mississippi.⁴⁵
10. 2025On July 1, Natrona County began a long-term contract to hold ICE detainees, and ICE brought 44 people to the Casper jail that month.¹¹

How far the official numbers can be trusted

For state prisons, the totals Wyoming gave the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics agree closely with the department's own list. The bureau's count of 113 deaths from 2001 to 2019 includes nine suicides and no homicides.²⁰ The department's list of deaths from 2005 to 2024, released to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, names 144 people; its yearly totals match the federal figures for 2008 and for 2011 through 2018 and differ by one in each of the other years.⁵²⁰ The department's press releases are a thinner record: they began in 2021, give no cause of death, and leave some deaths out entirely.⁴³

For county jails, the only official count is the federal one: 42 deaths from 2000 to 2019, from the 21 to 23 jail jurisdictions that reported to it each year.²¹ No Wyoming agency publishes a count or a list. WyoFile found 34 deaths from 2012 to 2022 by asking every sheriff,⁷ and counted 35 since 2011 in another story of the series.²² How complete any count is depends on what sheriffs choose to disclose; in Albany County, three deaths in eight months were never announced.¹⁶

A ruling on how someone died does not settle the questions a death raises. DCI's investigations ask only whether a crime was committed, not whether jail staff followed their own rules or national guidance, and its director said those questions belong to the sheriff's office.¹⁷ When Wesley Moorehouse, 66, was found unresponsive in a holding cell at the Goshen County Detention Center in January 2022, the coroner ruled his death natural, and the county attorney closed the case after DCI's review.²² In Kenneth Durrah's death, the autopsy found that he did not die of respiratory complications of being restrained, while outside medical experts who watched the video said holding him face down likely contributed.¹⁷¹⁸