No Indictments in #SandraBland Jail Cell Death, Twitter Reacts

Bland’s family says they have no faith in a grand jury that’s considering criminal indictments in her death in a Texas jail last summer.

The Texas Grand Jury has decided there will be no indictment in the death of Sandra Bland against anyone-not any of the police officers, not any of the jail officials or workers, nobody.

The case is not over, howevrer.

The grand jury will reconvene in January, however, to consider if there should be charges in her arrest, which was caught on video and sparked an uproar, according to the prosecutor.

On July 10, Bland was driving from IL to her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University, where she had gotten a new job, when she was pulled over by a state trooper for failing to use a turn signal in Prairie View, northwest of Houston. Though we have witnessed what appear to be clear-cut cases of excessive force by police in recent months – in South Carolina, Cincinnati and Chicago, for example – it remains hard to know what constitutes justice in cases like Gray’s and Bland’s.

“I can’t be asked to accept what they want me to accept without seeing anything, as a mom”, Reed-Veal told The Associated Press on Tuesday during an interview in Chicago.

“We are not going to allow what they have done in a limited, secret capacity to prevent us from doing what we need to do to get answers for the family”, Bland family attorney Cannon Lambert told CNN affiliate KPRC-TV in Houston. In the days after Bland died, county authorities released video from the jail to dispel rumors and conspiracy theories that she was dead before she arrived at the jail or was killed while in custody. She has also filed a wrongful death lawsuit, which is set to go to trial in January 2017. Texas Department of Safety officials later said Encinia did not follow department procedures and policies during the traffic stop, and he has been assigned to “administrative duty” since the incident. “The family expected the disappointing news because of the way things were postured”. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis has said there is nothing in their investigation “that shows anything happened but she killed herself”.

Dash-cam footage showed the traffic stop quickly becoming confrontational and the 28-year-old was arrested for assault.

Even so, it remains very much to be seen whether the outcome will ultimately be any different in the Gray cases than it was in the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in NY or Sandra Bland in Texas.

Waller County denies any wrongdoing, saying Bland did not say she was having suicidal thoughts at the time of her two screenings, throughout the booking process or while detained. A grand jury is considering whether to issue criminal indictments. A grand jury can still indict Encinia for inciting the traffic stop that led to Bland’s arrest and, ultimately, her death.

The special prosecutor added, “The grand jury found no evidence of homicide”. Let’s be clear, though: “If Sandra Bland had been white, she never would have been arrested in the first place”.

“Community reaction is pretty intense and obviously across social media there’s a lot of outrage”, Smith says.