Texas prosecutor names committee to review Sandra Bland case

“How dare a woman not present as a damsel?” No charges were ever brought against the officers. On the morning that Ms. Bland died, he said, all three jailers on duty were black or Hispanic.

Jessica Cotton, a junior at Prairie View from Houston, said she’s never had any problems with law enforcement, but what happened to Bland gave her pause.

“She was crying, and I could barely understand her”, Pyle told ABC 13. Bland’s family and friends, who called her Sandy, maintain that she would not have killed herself and they say that their confidence is shaken when it comes to what the investigation has detailed so far.

Since then, the case, the latest in a string of incidents involving police harassment and brutality this year, has gained worldwide attention.

“We are not celebrating a martyr or victim”, the church pastor said.

The Texas prosecutor responsible for investigating the death of Sandra Bland has enlisted the help of an independent committee of attorneys.

Bland was found hanging in her jail cell on the morning of Monday, July 13 with a plastic trash bag around her neck. The investigation concerns both the behavior of arresting officer Brian Encinia, who is seen in a dash cam video getting into an altercation with Bland after pulling her over for failure to signal, and Bland’s mysterious death in a prison cell three days later, which the coroner has ruled a suicide.

Mathis said he could understand how some people “looking at some of the bad things in our past would jump to the conclusion that this was a murder and not a suicide”. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation. Hundreds of people attended Sandra Bland’s funeral near the Chicago suburb where s… It’s profiling, sure, but it’s even worse than that. “When the law can be stretched to mean nearly anything, obeying it is no magic bullet”. Her death has caused an uproar on the social media questioning the treatment of blacks by authorities.

“It is also important that the community knows that the case will be reviewed by many sets of inquisitive legal minds that have no agenda other than reviewing the evidence and seeking justice, whatever form that may eventually take”, he said. “Something positive has to come out of this, or it’s going to get worse”.

Handcuffed, Ms. Bland was driven about 10 minutes to Hempstead and the Waller County jail, run by Sheriff R. Glenn Smith, a controversial figure since his days as Hempstead’s police chief. But the bigger issue is changing the system that leads to the arrests, detentions, and deaths of a disproportionate number of blacks at the hands of police.