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DALLAS (AP) — The small-town Texas jail where Sandra Bland died last summer needs a new building, more expertise among its staff to identify mental health issues, and body cameras and anger-management training for its jailers, according to a report issued Tuesday by a panel convened after Bland's death.
The sheriff's office in Waller County agreed to have outside experts review the county jail in Hempstead, about 50 miles northwest of Houston after Bland died. Bland, who was black, was jailed after a state trooper pulled her over in July for a minor traffic violation. Dashcam video of her arrest and the circumstances of her death provoked national outrage and drew the attention of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Video of the stop near Houston shows the trooper, Brian Encinia, yelling at Bland, then pulling a stun gun and saying, "I will light you up!" Encinia has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor perjury charge stemming from the stop. He has also been fired.
Bland, who was in the process of moving to Texas from the Chicago area, was found dead in the Waller County Jail three days after her arrest. Authorities said she was hanging from a jail cell partition with a plastic garbage bag around her neck. A medical examiner ruled it a suicide and a grand jury declined to indict any sheriff's officials or jailers in her death.
Bland's supporters have questioned whether the jail's conditions had anything to do with her death.
While the panelists who presented their jail report at a news conference Tuesday in Hempstead mostly stayed away from specifics about Bland's death, their recommendations target mental health screenings and the overall treatment of inmates.
One panelist, former U.S. Rep. Craig Washington, said anyone entering the jail was "entitled to be treated with dignity and respect as a human being."
Ultimately, that will require a new facility with more space, he said.
"The jail is not adequate, in our judgment," Washington said.
The panel also called on the sheriff's office to develop a policy for storing video footage and to purchase body cameras. It also said the jail should employ medical personnel who can screen incoming inmates for mental health issues.
Jailers supervising inmates should be separated from the officers who arrested them, the panel said. And jailers should undergo anger-management courses and routine evaluations.
Authorities have already said that Bland indicated on an intake questionnaire that she once tried to kill herself and was taking medication for epilepsy. Following her death, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards cited the jail for not observing inmates in person at least once every hour and not documenting that jailers had undergone training on dealing with potentially suicidal inmates.
Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith said he liked the report and was already starting to implement parts of it. He said jail staff would undergo "de-escalation" training in June, and that the county has already applied for a state grant to purchase body cameras.
"I'm open, willing to listen, and while we may not all agree on everything ... we're going to move forward," Smith said. "We're going to make a difference."
But the news conference was contentious at times. One person questioned why more attention wasn't paid to the high fees many jails charge inmates to make phone calls. Another accused Washington of being used by authorities to cover up their mistakes in Bland's case, to which he angrily replied, "You're absolutely wrong."
If the sheriff's office implements the report, Washington said, "I bet you six months from now, a year from now, we'll turn around and say, 'Wow, look at what they did in Waller County.'"
Bland's family has sued the county and the trooper who arrested her.
"It shouldn't take somebody dying to be self-reflective," said the family's attorney, Cannon Lambert, who had not seen the report.
"It may be a legacy that Sandy leaves that through her death, advances are made," Lambert added. "To that end, obviously, we would hope that problems at the jail get rectified."
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A judge on Wednesday ordered a Texasteenager who used an "affluenza" defense in a fatal drunken-driving wreck to serve nearly two years in jail, a surprising sanction that far exceeds the several months in jail that prosecutors initially said they would pursue.
Ethan Couch, who was appearing in adult court for the first time after he turned 19 on Monday, received 180 days for each of the four deaths in the June 2013 crash.
Initially, state District Judge Wayne Salvant said he would not immediately rule on how much longer Couch would spend in the Tarrant County jail. But he reconsidered his ruling after hearing an argument from prosecutors that Couch should be sentenced not to 120 days in jail for the crash, but to 180 days for each of four counts of intoxication manslaughter under a separate part of Texas code.
Couch had always faced the prospect of adult jail time as part of his probation once his case had moved out of the juvenile system. Prosecutors didn't ask the judge to declare Couch had violated his juvenile probation by fleeing to Mexico with his mother last year, or to consider it in his ruling.
Each 180-day term will be served consecutively, Salvant ordered. Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson said Wednesday that it was not clear if that would include the time Couch has already spent in jail.
Prosecutors declined to comment afterward on their strategy, citing a gag order Salvant has issued in the case. For months, they had indicated they wouldn't be able to get more than a few months in jail for Couch, though they said he might face decades in prison if he violated his probation again as an adult.
But as the hearing Wednesday neared an end, prosecutors said they wanted Salvant to consider a section under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure that allows a judge to give a defendant facing probation for a felony crime up to 180 days. Prosecutors then asked Salvant to issue a "stacked" sentence, running each of the four punishments consecutively.
Salvant agreed over the objections of Reagan Wynn, one of Couch's attorneys. But he said he would give both sides two weeks to file any response to his sentence, suggesting that he might reconsider.
The initial sentence of 10 years of probation that Couch received in juvenile court outraged prosecutors and relatives of the victims, which include one teenager who was paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.
The new jail time surprised Greg Coontz, a lawyer who represented one person killed in the crash and another who was injured. Coontz said it was good news that Couch received more punishment, but he questioned whether it was enough to rehabilitate Couch.
"In some ways, it's kind of ironic that at this point he gets so much more time than he did initially," Coontz said. "It almost seems like it worked backward."
Couch lost control of his family's pickup truck after he and his friends had played beer pong and drank beer that some of them had stolen from a Wal-Mart. He veered into a crowd of people helping the driver of a disabled vehicle on the side of the road. Authorities later estimated that he was going 70 mph in a 40 mph zone.
The crash fatally injured the stranded motorist, a youth minister who stopped to help her and a mother and daughter who came out of their nearby home.
Couch was found to have had a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit.
Couch ended up in trouble again last year after a cellphone video showed him at what appeared to be a party with alcohol. Drinking alcohol is a violation of Couch's probation. Shortly after the video surfaced, Couch and his mother, Tonya, fled to Mexico.
The two were apprehended in a Mexican resort city in December and sent back to the United States. Couch has been in custody since.
It was not Couch's first run-in with the law. At 15, Couch was given two citations after a police officer found him behind the wheel of a pickup truck next to a half-naked girl, with an open vodka bottle on the backseat floor.
Ethan's father, Fred, runs a roofing and construction company and has faced lawsuits over a $100,000 debt and allegations of sexual harassment. Tonya Couch is charged with hindering the apprehension of a felon for helping Ethan flee to Mexico.
Miller, the psychologist who suggested Couch had "affluenza," blamed Couch's parents at his sentencing for having "taught him a system that's 180 degrees from rational. If you hurt someone, say you're sorry. In that family, if you hurt someone, send some money."
Fred Couch attended Wednesday's hearing. He did not respond to questions as he left the courthouse.
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — The lives of 18-year-old University of Texas student Haruka Weiser and the teenage suspect in her killing differed dramatically.
Weiser grew up in a tight-knit community in Oregon, where she attended an arts magnet school and danced with the Portland Ballet.
By contrast, Meechaiel Khalil Criner, the 17-year-old runaway arrested in her death, was intellectually disabled, abandoned by his mother as an infant and in Texas foster care, his uncle, Leo Criner, told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Authorities say Weiser and Criner's lives intersected violently on UT's Austin campus, leaving Weiser dead in a creek on school grounds Tuesday and Criner jailed two days later in Travis County on a $1 million bond.
She grew up near Beaverton, Oregon, in a four-acre co-housing community established in 1998 around the values of community, service and sustainability, where residents share tools like lawn mowers but also responsibilities like gardening, said Weiser's neighbor, Helen Spector.
"She always had sunshine in her smile wherever she went," Spector told the AP by phone Saturday while preparing soup for Weiser's grieving parents and younger sister and brother.
Spector said Weiser loved ballet and hip-hop dancing and wanted to study medicine, emulating her father, a doctor in Oregon.
She attended Arts and Communications Magnet Academy in Beaverton, and also performed with the Beaverton Dance West Troupe, Portland Ballet and Oregon Symphony.
Weiser's parents could not be reached for comment Saturday but said in a statement a day earlier that they "remain steadfast in our desire to honor Haruka's memory through kindness and love. Not violence."
Leo Criner said his nephew, Meechaiel, was bullied throughout his childhood in Texarkana, Texas, and has the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.
"I refuse to believe he just maliciously killed this young lady," the uncle said in a phone interview from Texarkana, where he lives. "This kid don't know nothing about killing. His mind don't compute like that."
Mary Wadley said authorities had told her that her grandson, Meechaiel, was caught shoplifting in McKinney, Texas, shortly before he was admitted into an emergency youth homeless shelter Monday in Austin, about 225 miles away.
McKinney police spokeswoman Sabrina Boston did not return messages seeking comment.
Wadley, who also lives in Texarkana, said she planned to travel to Austin on Monday.
Weiser was last seen leaving the UT campus drama building Sunday night. Waller Creek, where her body was found Tuesday, is along the route she took from her dorm to the drama building, police have said. The creek is near the alumni center and football stadium, an area that hums with activity day and night.
The killing shook a campus of about 50,000 students.
Police released surveillance video that showed a man they said was a suspect walking a women's bicycle. Firefighters later recognized the man as Criner, whom they had spoken to in connection with a trash fire near the UT campus on Monday. An Austin resident who reported the fire also called police when she saw the surveillance video, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said Friday.
Criner wasn't arrested for the fire but was instead taken to a Life Works shelter. Police found him there Thursday and took him into custody without incident. His arrest affidavit said his clothing matched that of the man on the surveillance video and that he was in possession of a women's bike, as well as Weiser's duffel bag and some of her other belongings, including her laptop.
The arrest affidavit said Weiser's body had "obvious trauma." An autopsy showed she had been assaulted, but police have refused to release further details about how she died.
The affidavit also said campus surveillance video not made public showed the suspect watching a female thought to be Weiser as she walked in the direction of her dorm with her head down, looking at her cellphone.
As she passed, the affidavit said, the suspect produced "what appeared to be a shiny rigid object" and followed her. The pair dropped from view as they reached the creek bank, though, and the suspect wasn't seen on video again for two-plus hours.
Police have said a crime scene weapon hasn't been recovered, however, and Acevedo wouldn't speculate on motive.