Sandra Bland, the black woman found hanging dead in a Texas jail days after a traffic stop, smoked or possibly swallowed a large amount of marijuana while in custody, her family’s attorney reported the district attorney as saying.
Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis made the disclosure in a text message to attorney Cannon Lambert, who has called the state’s autopsy on the Chicago-area woman defective, Lambert said.
“Looking at the autopsy results and toxicology, it appears she swallowed a large quantity of marijuana or smoked it in the jail,” Mathis said in a text message to Lambert that the attorney provided to Reuters.
Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the text. Repeated calls to Mathis’ office were not returned.
“This will of course be very relevant in any future criminal or civil litigation,” the message from Mathis to Lambert said.
This doesn’t look good for the police of Waller county. Even if actual murder is a leap, we KNOW this:
(1) The dashcam, nor the eyewitness video, supports the officer’s account of what happened. We don’t see her assaulting the officer.
(2) The arrest was unwarranted. Bland was under no legal obligation to extinguish the cigarette in her own car, even with a traffic stop.
(3) If, as the Waller county police assert, Sandra Bland had attempted suicide in the past (she told them in her admittance paperwork), they should have put her on a suicide watch. They did not do this.
(4) If the toxicology of the autopsy is correct, how did marijuana get in her cell?
UPDATE – several hours later:
Medical examiners ruled the death of Sandra Bland a suicide by hanging, and the autopsy uncovered no evidence of a violent struggle,according to the Texas prosecutor Warren Diepraam, the first assistant district attorney of Waller County:
Diepraam said there were no defensive injuries on Bland’s hands. He said there were about 30 cuts on her wrists, and that the scarring suggests they were made two to four weeks ago, well before her arrest.
Diepraam said that toxicology tests found marijuana in Bland’s system, but he said further tests would be necessary to determine when she ingested it.
Jail intake forms filled out for Bland appear to show that she told jailers she tried to commit suicide last year, and that she had been “very depressed” in the past. But the answers on the forms are inconsistent.
Apparently, reporters were walked through graphic photos. There is a concurrent investigation going on as to what happened at the roadside.