What the Sheriff Promised, What the Sheriff Delivered

Citizens board, researchers rebuke sheriff for withholding jail death data

San Diego's jails have killed more inmates per capita than any other large county in California for nearly two decades. Sheriff Kelly Martinez ran in 2022 promising reform, transparency, and outside audits. Three and a half years on, the auditors she promised to welcome say her office stonewalled them — and a federal judge has now sanctioned the county for destroying video evidence in a $16 million wrongful-death case. Voters next get a say in June 2028.

SAN DIEGO · May 8, 2026

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: 

San Diego County's seven jails have recorded among the highest in-custody death rates in California for nearly two decades. A 2022 California State Auditor report found 185 inmates died from 2006 through 2020 — more deaths per average daily population than any other large county in the state — and faulted both the Sheriff's Department and the Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) for failing to prevent them. Eight months after that report, then-Undersheriff Kelly Martinez was elected Sheriff on a platform of overhauling jail incarceration, welcoming outside audits, and making in-custody death reviews public. Three and a half years into her term, an outside research team CLERB hired to do exactly such an audit reported on May 7, 2026, that the Sheriff's Office had refused to release the comparative records they needed to complete the work. Two weeks earlier, a federal magistrate judge had sanctioned the county for destroying 57 hours of jail video in a $16 million wrongful-death case — the largest such settlement in county history. Since 2016, San Diego taxpayers have paid more than $58 million to settle jail-related claims. Sheriff Martinez does not face voters again until the June 2028 primary; her current term runs through January 8, 2029.

"We Did Not Receive That Information"

For roughly two hours on Thursday evening, members of the San Diego County Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board and a packed audience at 1600 Pacific Highway heard the same answer to question after question about how, why, and when people die in the county's jails: "We did not receive that information."

The phrase came from Cheryl Brown Hill, a senior researcher at The Mountain-Whisper-Light: Statistics & Data Science, the Seattle firm CLERB engaged in 2023 to conduct an independent study of in-custody deaths across the seven county detention facilities. "We asked similar questions in our CPRA requests, and on the whole we were not able to obtain any data," Brown Hill told the board, referring to the firm's repeated formal requests under the California Public Records Act.

Audience members had submitted dozens of written questions: how long deputies waited before intervening when alerted to medical distress; whether victims of in-custody homicides had been booked on charges involving women or children; whether deceased inmates had been held in solitary confinement before they died. Most went unanswered. Times of San Diego reported that even board members appeared visibly frustrated.

"These were really good questions. They're very insightful. They're important questions, and we would have loved to have gotten the data so that we could have looked into those issues." — Michele Deitch, co-investigator

 

Who the Investigators Are

The research team is not a fly-by-night operation. The Mountain-Whisper-Light was founded in 1989 and has produced more than 200 peer-reviewed publications across medicine, public health, and forensic statistics. Its principal authors hold uncommonly heavy credentials for a municipal contract:

• Dr. Nayak Polissar, PhD — the firm's founder and lead author on the San Diego study. A statistician who has served as an expert witness in dozens of federal and state cases, Polissar's published work covers cardiology, pain management, neurology, and forensic data analysis.
• Dr. Nirnaya Miljacic (Mil), PhD/MS — the firm's senior biostatistician. He holds a PhD in physics from Northwestern University and an MS in biostatistics from the University of Washington, with post-doctoral work at Brown and Caltech.
• Cheryl Brown Hill — senior research staff who handled the public-records correspondence with the Sheriff's Office.
• Michele Deitch, JD — not a Mountain-Whisper-Light employee but a contributing co-investigator. Deitch is a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Texas Law School, directs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, co-chairs the American Bar Association's Subcommittee on Correctional Oversight, and helped draft the ABA's Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners. She is widely regarded as the country's leading academic expert on independent oversight of correctional facilities and was instrumental in drafting Texas's Sandra Bland Act.

This is the team that told CLERB on Thursday that, despite three years of work, it could not answer most of the questions the board itself had commissioned the study to answer.

What the Researchers Could Show — and Couldn't

The final report, finalized in April 2026 and posted on CLERB's website, did surface several findings of substance. Among them:

• From December 27, 2011, through April 2, 2024, 91 inmates died at San Diego Central Jail alone — roughly half of all jail deaths countywide during the study window.
• Central Jail's per-capita death rate is nearly twice that of the Vista Detention Facility, the second-deadliest site.
• Nearly 55 percent of deaths over the 12-year window were ruled non-natural — overdoses, suicides, accidents, and homicides. Twelve of the system's fifteen homicides occurred at Central Jail; every other facility had at most one.
• Central Jail had the highest rate of inmate-on-staff assaults in the system — 63 percent higher than the next facility.
• The first 48 hours of booking are by far the most lethal interval for new inmates. Brett Kalina, CLERB's executive officer, attributed this to acute toxicity at intake and untreated withdrawal.
• Eighty-five percent of inmates who died had never been convicted of a crime.
• Inmates who received more visits while in custody were less likely to die behind bars.

What the report could not do — and what its authors said is its central methodological limitation — was compare those who died to those who lived.

"Comparing those who died to those who didn't die allows you to identify a cause. Once you have a cause, then somebody can try to do something about changing that cause. We've emphasized getting the data. You can't make any conclusions without the data." — Dr. Nayak Polissar, lead author

Dr. Miljacic, who flew down from Seattle to present the findings in person, was blunter still: "Once you close yourself into just looking at San Diego, never compared to anything in the rest of the world, what do you contrast inside? The biggest contrast: person who enters jail and dies, and person who enters jail and does not die." Without that comparison, he said, "you cut 90 percent of things" the study could otherwise have examined. "It just goes away."

The team also received no mental-health data from the Sheriff's Office on either the deceased or the broader inmate population, forcing it to use suicides and overdoses as a "crude approximation" of mental-health prevalence. The county Health and Human Services Agency, by contrast, was described as cooperative and provided what records it had on whether deceased inmates had accessed mental-health services.

The Sheriff's Justification

Assistant Sheriff Dustin Lopez addressed the board during closing comments. The information withheld, he said, was protected by law: "personal medical data, booking information, charges and mental health history and stuff like that. We're trying to be, as an office, as transparent as possible."

That position is consistent with the office's earlier public statements. In November 2024, after CLERB Chair MaryAnne Pintar sent a two-page Letter of Concern to Sheriff Martinez detailing the "frustrating battle" to obtain records, Sheriff's Media Relations Director Kimberly King told CBS 8 that CLERB was demanding "confidential, legally protected information" and that "each California Public Records Act request has been evaluated carefully" with denials based on "legally identified exemptions." King also took the position that "the study does not fall within CLERB's jurisdiction, duties, and responsibilities," and that San Diego County Administrative Code section 340.15 — which governs CLERB's authority to obtain records — "does not apply to CLERB's requests for data to perform the study."

That latter argument is the legal nub of the dispute. In effect, the Sheriff's Office contends that CLERB's record-access powers extend to investigations of individual deaths or complaints, but not to a multi-year, system-wide research study commissioned through an outside contractor. CLERB and its statisticians counter that nothing in the underlying medical-privacy statutes — primarily HIPAA, California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, and Welfare & Institutions Code §5328 — bars the production of de-identified records to a board with statutory oversight authority. The 2022 State Auditor's report itself reviewed thirty individual death case files in detail, demonstrating that such access is legally workable when the holder of the records is willing to provide it.

CLERB hired outside legal counsel and considered litigation to compel production. The lawsuit option was ultimately not pursued, in part because, as Pintar's November 2024 letter noted, the contracting and litigation costs were already eroding the study's budget through repeated amendments.

What She Promised the Voters in 2022

Kelly Martinez was elected Sheriff on November 8, 2022, defeating Republican former Assistant City Attorney John Hemmerling after edging him in the June primary. She took office on January 2, 2023. She had spent nearly four decades in the department, rising from deputy to Undersheriff under Sheriff Bill Gore — under whose 12-year tenure the bulk of the deaths catalogued in the State Auditor's report had occurred. Gore endorsed her. So did Senate President pro tem Toni Atkins, four of the five County Supervisors, and the Deputy Sheriffs' Association. Martinez had switched her party registration from Republican to Democrat in 2020.

The State Auditor's report had landed in February 2022, eight months before the general election. It dominated the campaign. Pressed by reporters, candidate forums, and grieving families, Martinez committed publicly to a long list of reforms. Among the most concrete:

• An overhaul of how the county incarcerates. At an October 2022 KPBS forum, she said: "We need to really overhaul the way that we incarcerate people in San Diego County and the way that we look at incarceration. We can do a lot to improve people's health, improve their mental health, improve their lives, give them opportunities and support while they're in custody."
• Welcoming outside oversight. At a Voice of San Diego forum the same month, she said she "welcomed an outside audit of the department's treatment of incarcerated people" — the very category of independent review the Mountain-Whisper-Light contract turned out to be.
• Public review of every in-custody death. She issued an order, before taking office, that all in-custody fatalities be reviewed by the Sheriff's Critical Incident Review Board with the results released to the public.
• CLERB access to death scenes. She agreed CLERB staff officers could respond to in-custody deaths in real time.
• Body-worn cameras. She launched a pilot equipping all deputies at Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility with body cameras.
• Contraband interdiction. Body scanners, drug-detection dogs, intelligence-gathering, and — eventually, after sustained public pressure — random drug screening of deputies and contractors.
• Better intake screening. Voluntary urine testing at booking and immediate withdrawal protocols, a direct response to the Serna case.
• A $500 million capital plan to modernize aging detention infrastructure, formally announced in November 2023.

The Public Record on the Numbers

The Sheriff's Office promotes the following death counts as evidence the reforms are working:

Calendar Year	In-Custody Deaths	Sheriff
2022	19 (one of the highest on record)	Gore / interim Ray / Martinez
2023	13	Martinez
2024	9	Martinez
2025 (through September)	8 (on pace to roughly match 2024)	Martinez

From those raw counts, the Sheriff's Office calculated a "68 percent reduction in in-custody deaths between 2022 and 2023" and a 65 percent reduction in overdose deaths between 2024 and 2025. Independent verification of those rates — adjusted for the average daily population, age and acuity mix of inmates, length of stay, or the substantial post-2022 changes in California sentencing and pre-trial release patterns — has not been published. That, in turn, is precisely what the Mountain-Whisper-Light researchers were attempting to do when their record requests were rebuffed.

The Sheriff's own messaging has been disciplined and consistent. In her own words across multiple venues:

"Our focus has been on preventing suicides from occurring. We're not taking a victory lap by any means, but we're very proud of our record." — Sheriff Martinez, addressing CLERB, October 2024

"We've been working hard on improvements to our jails, and we still have much to do… we do a better mental and medical health screening at intake. We're doing a voluntary urine screening at intake to understand what people have in their system when they enter our jails so we can start them on withdrawal protocols immediately." — Sheriff Martinez, CBS 8, March 2023

"That audit was in 2022, and since we received the recommendations of the auditors, the state auditors, we have been working hard to follow all of those recommendations. Many of them we actually gave the auditors as things that we would like to accomplish." — Sheriff Martinez, CBS 8, September 2025

Where the Rhetoric Meets the Record

Three episodes since Martinez took office sit uneasily against the 2022 campaign promises.

1. The data refusal. Martinez campaigned on welcoming outside audits. Her office then spent three years declining the records requests of the outside auditors CLERB had hired, forcing CLERB to retain outside legal counsel, amend the contract repeatedly, and ultimately accept a study that — in the words of the lead researcher — could "not make any conclusions" about what makes the deaths preventable. CLERB Chair MaryAnne Pintar's November 12, 2024, Letter of Concern documents the pattern in detail. As of the May 7, 2026, presentation, the dispute remains unresolved.

2. The Schuck video destruction sanctions. On October 28, 2025 — two weeks before the county announced its record $16 million settlement with the family of 22-year-old Hayden Schuck — U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw and U.S. Magistrate Judge Allison Goddard formally sanctioned San Diego County for the destruction of 57 hours of jail video footage that could have shown what happened to Schuck in the days before his death from withdrawal and dehydration in San Diego Central Jail. Magistrate Judge Goddard, in a sharply worded order, called the failure to preserve the footage "shocking in the height of negligence." The destruction occurred under Sheriff Martinez's tenure, after she had publicly committed to releasing the results of every Critical Incident Review Board investigation. The Schuck family's lawsuit had specifically alleged the Sheriff's Office "failed to preserve crucial evidence that could have shown what happened in the 22-year-old's final days." The sanctions effectively confirmed that allegation.

3. The deputy contraband-screening reversal. In November 2023, after a series of fentanyl overdoses, CLERB recommended that the Sheriff's Office screen its own deputies for drugs as they entered the jails. Martinez initially rejected the recommendation, telling reporters her office had "developed a strategy to plug the gaps in our security." She held that line for eight months. In July 2024, after the publication of CLERB's Fosbinder and Thuresson investigations — both of which concluded that fentanyl had reached the deceased while they were in custody — and after sustained pressure from advocacy groups, the Sheriff's Office reversed course and announced random staff drug and contraband screening. The reversal undercut the office's earlier public position that no internal smuggling problem existed.

Activist Darwin Fishman summarized the gap between rhetoric and outcome at an October 2024 CLERB meeting in a line that has since been quoted often: the department's progress, he said, has come not from voluntary reform but "because of lawsuits — literally over dead bodies."

The Cost to Taxpayers Keeps Rising

CBS 8 reported in November 2024 that San Diego County had paid more than $42 million since 2016 to settle jail-related claims and lawsuits. With the October 2025 Schuck settlement of $16 million, that figure now exceeds $58 million — and county counsel was still defending at least 20 additional in-custody-death cases as of late 2025, with more settlements expected. The Lines case, filed December 31, 2025, is among them.

Every dollar of that settlement spending comes from the county General Fund — that is, from the same taxpayers who elect the Sheriff. None of it comes out of the Sheriff's Department's own budget. Critics including Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe have argued this structural decoupling of liability from departmental finances weakens the natural incentive to prevent the deaths in the first place.

On the Ballot in 2028 — Six Years After She Was Elected

San Diego sheriffs traditionally served four-year terms tied to the gubernatorial election cycle. That changed in 2022. On September 29, 2022 — five weeks before Martinez was elected — Governor Gavin Newsom quietly signed Assembly Bill 759, which moved San Diego County's sheriff and district attorney elections from the gubernatorial cycle (2022, 2026, 2030) to the presidential cycle (2024, 2028, 2032). The transition was accomplished by extending the terms of the 2022 winners by two years. Martinez and District Attorney Summer Stephan thus serve six-year terms, not four. Sheriff Martinez's term ends on January 8, 2029. The June 2, 2026, San Diego County primary ballot does not include the Sheriff. Voters next get to weigh in at the June 2028 California presidential primary, with any runoff on November 3, 2028. Filing for that race opens in early 2028.

The bill's proponents — including the League of Women Voters — argued that aligning sheriff elections with presidential turnout would broaden the electorate. Many incumbent sheriffs and the California State Sheriffs' Association opposed it, arguing that the change would lengthen unaccountable terms. AB 759 received almost no coverage during the 2022 sheriff's campaign; neither Martinez nor Hemmerling mentioned it during their final University of San Diego debate. As a practical matter, San Diego voters who cast ballots for Sheriff Martinez in November 2022 on the strength of her reform platform will not have another chance to weigh in on her performance until seventy-two months after they elected her.

Until that 2028 primary opens for candidate filing, the political accountability mechanisms available to San Diego voters are limited to:

• The Board of Supervisors, which controls the Sheriff's Department budget, the contracts for jail medical care, and the scope of CLERB's authority. Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe led the December 2024 4-0 vote expanding CLERB's jurisdiction over medical contractors despite Martinez's public opposition.
• CLERB itself, whose subpoena power and expanded medical-contractor jurisdiction remain largely untested and whose ability to compel records from the Sheriff's Office is the central legal question raised by the Mountain-Whisper-Light dispute.
• The civil courts, which have so far proven the most effective accountability mechanism — at the cost of more than $58 million in taxpayer settlements and, in the Schuck case, formal judicial findings of evidence destruction.
• The state Legislature, where Assemblymember Akilah Weber's AB 2343 was vetoed in 2022 and where successor legislation has not advanced.
• Recall, which under California Elections Code §11000 et seq. is theoretically available against any elected sheriff but has not been initiated.

For the families of the deceased, and for the voters who put Sheriff Martinez in office on a reform platform, the more proximate accountability question is whether the promises made in 2022 — the overhaul, the welcomed outside audit, the public review of every death — are still operative commitments or campaign artifacts. The Mountain-Whisper-Light researchers' three-year experience, the Schuck video sanctions, and the deputy-screening reversal each speak to that question in their own way. The voters will get a chance to weigh in on the answer in roughly twenty-six months. Those who care about the outcome would do well, between now and then, to remember.

A Pattern Stretching Back Two Decades

The current dispute is the latest chapter in a problem the State of California has formally documented as systemic. In February 2022, the California State Auditor (Report 2021-109) issued a 126-page review concluding that 185 people died in San Diego County jails between 2006 and 2020 — "one of the highest totals among counties in the state" — and that fifty-two of those deaths were suicides, "more than twice the number in each of the comparable counties." Acting State Auditor Michael Tilden wrote that "deficiencies with how the Sheriff's Department provides care for and protects incarcerated individuals … likely contributed to in-custody deaths."

The audit also faulted CLERB itself, finding the board "has failed to provide effective, independent oversight of in-custody deaths" and had not investigated nearly one-third of the deaths during the audit window.

State Assemblymember Akilah Weber, M.D. (D-San Diego) responded with Assembly Bill 2343, the "Saving Lives in Custody Act," which would have required the state Board of State and Community Corrections to develop minimum mental-health standards for county jails and added a licensed physician and a licensed mental-health professional to that board. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed AB 2343 on September 29, 2022, citing concerns about cost and existing regulatory authority. Weber and a coalition of local justice advocates publicly criticized the veto.

In December 2024, the County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0, on a motion by Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe, to expand CLERB's jurisdiction to investigate contracted health-care providers and other employees in cases involving in-custody death. Sheriff Martinez publicly opposed the expansion, telling reporters it was something CLERB had been "insisting upon for years" and characterizing the push as part of a broader movement to "abolish all jails."

The Settlements Keep Mounting

Whatever the Sheriff's Office releases or withholds in research data, the county's checkbook tells its own story. CBS 8 reported in November 2024 that taxpayers had paid more than $42 million since 2016 to settle jail-related claims and lawsuits. That number has since grown sharply:

• July 2024 — $15 million to the family of Elisa Serna, a 24-year-old pregnant woman who died on her fifth day in the Las Colinas Detention Facility in November 2019 after correctional and medical staff allegedly mistook severe alcohol and opioid withdrawal for malingering. Surveillance video introduced in the case showed Serna collapsing 18 times, vomiting more than 60 times, and suffering multiple seizures, four of which were witnessed by jail personnel. A treating physician, Dr. Carole Ann Gilmore, lost her medical license. Criminal charges against Gilmore and a nurse did not result in convictions.
• October 2025 — $16 million to the family of William Hayden Schuck, 22, who died in San Diego Central Jail of withdrawal and dehydration six days after booking. The settlement was the largest in county history for an in-custody death. The Schuck lawsuit also alleged the Sheriff's Office failed to preserve evidence relevant to his final days.
• December 2025 — pending federal lawsuit filed by the family of Callen Lines, a 36-year-old mother and nursing assistant who died in Las Colinas approximately 36 hours after booking in May 2025. The complaint alleges deputies dismissed her medical complaints and a nurse documented dangerously elevated blood pressure (160/90) without escalating care.

Supervisor Montgomery Steppe's office reported in September 2025 that eight people had died in custody so far that year. The Sheriff's Office, in its formal response to the Mountain-Whisper-Light report, claimed overdose deaths fell 65 percent between 2024 and 2025 and noted that medical doctors were added to booking facilities in 2025 to enhance intake screening. Independent verification of those figures has not been published.

Other Findings the Sheriff Disputes

Beyond the deaths themselves, recent court filings and oversight reviews have raised additional concerns about jail conditions:

• An environmental-health expert report submitted as part of a January 2025 lawsuit found that six of the county's seven jails failed to meet minimum health and safety standards. The expert, Debra Graham, characterized conditions as "filthy" and "deplorable." Sheriff Martinez has publicly acknowledged that the aging infrastructure — including the 49-year-old Vista Detention Facility, where one housing unit has been closed because of malfunctioning cell doors — complicates sanitation.
• CLERB investigations of two separate overdose deaths (those of inmates Fosbinder and Thuresson) concluded that fentanyl had reached the deceased while they were in Sheriff's custody, although the source of the contraband could not be conclusively identified.
• In November 2023, CLERB recommended that the Sheriff's Office screen its own deputies for drugs entering the jails. Sheriff Martinez initially rejected the recommendation; the office announced random staff drug and contraband screening in July 2024 after sustained public pressure.
• Since 2020, the county has paid roughly 128 times more in sexual-misconduct claims involving Sheriff's Office personnel than for all other county departments combined, according to East County Magazine.

Voices the Board Heard

Yusef Miller of the North County Equity and Justice Coalition — one of the advocacy groups whose pressure helped trigger the original 2022 state audit — told the board on Thursday that the frustration researchers and CLERB members were experiencing was a small taste of what bereaved families have endured for years.

"Data, data and the lack of data is all you've heard. If you were an impacted family, you can now feel some of the frustration that they have trying to get data on their loved ones. And they don't work for the county like you do. They're not hired as a contractor like you guys are." — Yusef Miller, North County Equity and Justice Coalition

Paloma Serna, Elisa Serna's mother, has been a fixture at CLERB and Board of Supervisors meetings since her daughter's 2019 death. At a September 2025 supervisors' meeting, she warned the board not to "pass oversight on paper and starve it in practice."

Investigative reporter Kelly Davis, who covered the deaths for nearly a decade with co-author Dave Maas at the now-defunct San Diego CityBeat, told Times of San Diego in 2022 that her early reporting had been challenged by the Sheriff's Office, which at one point attempted to subpoena her notes and interviews. A federal magistrate judge, Andrew Schopler, quashed that subpoena on February 2, 2018.

Where the Story Goes From Here

The Mountain-Whisper-Light report is now public and has been transmitted to the Sheriff's Office. The Sheriff's formal response acknowledges the findings, asserts that several recommendations are already being implemented (expanded staffing, mental-health programming, and movement of higher-acuity populations to appropriate facilities), and points to a $500 million capital plan to modernize and replace aging detention infrastructure.

What the report did not resolve — because the underlying records were never produced — is whether any of the deaths classified as "natural" might in fact have been preventable with adequate medical screening or response. CLERB Chair MaryAnne Pintar publicly thanked the researchers for persevering through what she described as a difficult process. Board member Dr. R. Lee Brown called the study "extremely enlightening, educational to me, even though we need the data that we think we should have."

For families like the Sernas, the Schucks, and the Lineses, the report is one more document on a stack that grows by roughly one death every five to seven weeks. The 2022 State Auditor's recommendations that legislative action was needed remain, four years on, largely unimplemented. CLERB's expanded December 2024 jurisdiction over medical contractors has yet to produce a published report. And as of this writing, the central legal question raised by the Mountain-Whisper-Light study — whether a duly empowered civilian oversight board can compel its own sheriff to release de-identified inmate records for systemic-risk analysis — remains unresolved in San Diego County.

The deaths, meanwhile, continue.

Sources and Citations

1. Sitton, Drew. "Researchers, oversight board rebuke sheriff for withholding data in jail deaths study." Times of San Diego, May 8, 2026. https://timesofsandiego.com/
2. Sitton, Drew. "Researchers narrowed down where – and when – it's most lethal to be behind bars in San Diego County's notorious jails." Times of San Diego, May 2, 2026. https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2026/05/02/san-diego-central-jail-deaths-over-capacity/
3. "Study on in-custody deaths released, to be presented to CLERB next month." Times of San Diego, April 21, 2026. https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2026/04/21/study-on-in-custody-deaths-released-to-be-presented-to-clerb-next-month/
4. San Diego County Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board. "CLERB Announces Publication of Independent Study on In-Custody Deaths in San Diego County Jails." News release, April 21, 2026. https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/clerb/media/news-release/04-21-2026_CLERB%20announces%20publication%20of%20Independent%20Study%20on%20In-Custody%20Deaths%20in%20San%20Diego%20County%20Jails.pdf
5. Pintar, MaryAnne. "Letter of Concern: San Diego Sheriff's Office Cooperation, In-Custody Death Data Study." San Diego County CLERB, November 12, 2024. https://sandiegocounty.gov/content/dam/sdc/clerb/meetings/2024/2024-11-12/Draft_Letter%20of%20Concern_In%20Custody%20Death%20Data%20Study.pdf
6. "CLERB faces roadblocks in investigating San Diego jail deaths." CBS 8 San Diego, November 11, 2024. https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/law-enforcement-oversight-sheriff-wont-release-death-records/509-0ac412e7-a749-40a4-89b3-aed875b29385
7. "Oversight board demands better cooperation from San Diego Sheriff's Department." NBC 7 San Diego, November 13, 2024. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/oversight-board-demands-cooperation-san-diego-sheriffs-department/3674833/
8. California State Auditor. San Diego County Sheriff's Department: It Has Failed to Adequately Prevent and Respond to the Deaths of Individuals in Its Custody. Report 2021-109, February 2022. https://information.auditor.ca.gov/reports/2021-109/index.html (Full PDF: https://information.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2021-109.pdf)
9. "Lawmakers Call State Audit on SD Jail Deaths 'Deeply Disturbing,' Back Fixes." Times of San Diego, February 4, 2022. https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2022/02/03/lawmakers-call-state-audit-on-sd-jail-deaths-deeply-disturbing-back-fixes/
10. Weber, Akilah, M.D. "Statement on Governor Newsom Veto of AB 2343 Saving Lives in Custody Act." Office of Assemblymember Akilah Weber, September 29, 2022. https://a79.asmdc.org/press-releases/20220929-dr-akilah-weber-statement-governor-newsom-veto-ab-2343-saving-lives-custody
11. "County supervisors vote 4-0 for stronger law enforcement review board powers." KPBS, December 11, 2024. https://www.kpbs.org/news/politics/2024/12/11/county-supervisors-vote-4-0-for-stronger-law-enforcement-review-board-powers
12. "Supervisors hand law enforcement oversight board new powers on in-custody deaths." Times of San Diego, October 1, 2025. https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2025/09/30/supervisors-oversight-board-new-powers-in-custody-deaths/
13. "County will pay $16 million over 22-year-old's death in San Diego jail, its biggest such settlement ever." The Press Democrat (via Tribune Content Agency), October 29, 2025. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/10/29/county-will-pay-16m-over-22-year-olds-death-in-san-diego-jail-its-biggest-such-settlement-ever/
14. "Family of man who died in San Diego jail reaches $16M settlement with county." KPBS, October 29, 2025. https://www.kpbs.org/news/quality-of-life/2025/10/29/family-of-man-who-died-in-san-diego-jail-reaches-16m-settlement-with-county
15. "$15 Million Settlement Reached in San Diego Jail Detainee's Untreated Withdrawal Death." Prison Legal News, August 1, 2025. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2025/aug/1/15-million-settlement-reached-san-diego-jail-detainees-untreated-withdrawal-death/ (Underlying case: Estate of Serna v. County of San Diego, USDC S.D. Cal., Case No. 3:20-cv-02096.)
16. "'I feel like I'm going to pass out': Family's lawsuit says jail guards ignored Callen Lines' pleas for help." CBS 8 San Diego, January 2, 2026. https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/i-feel-like-im-going-to-pass-out-familys-lawsuit-says-guards-ignored-callen-lines-pleas-for-help/509-a352bb32-a1e7-485e-b6e6-3454411fc700
17. "Deputies wrongly allowed drugs into San Diego County jails, civilian oversight board finds." San Diego Union-Tribune/Corrections1, July 1, 2024. https://www.corrections1.com/investigations/deputies-wrongly-allowed-drugs-into-san-diego-county-jails-civilian-oversight-board-finds
18. "A lethal pattern of neglect in San Diego county jails." East County Magazine, October 28, 2025. https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/lethal-pattern-neglect-san-diego-county-jails
19. "Federal judge sanctions San Diego County for destroying 57 hours of jail video in Schuck case." East County Magazine, October 28, 2025 (reporting orders from U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw and Magistrate Judge Allison Goddard). https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/sheriff-kelly-martinez
20. Davis, Kelly. "More nurses, fewer drugs, no suicides: Sheriff touts jail reforms, upgrades before civilian review board." San Diego Union-Tribune, October 2024. Archived at https://authory.com/KellyDavis/More-nurses-fewer-drugs-no-suicides-Sheriff-touts-jail-reforms-upgrades-before-civilian-review-board-a9286e3dccb5e4344990b4a28b93d125a
21. "'Prevent any death we can': San Diego Sheriff outlines reforms amid high jail death rates." CBS 8 San Diego, September 26, 2025. https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/prevent-any-death-we-can-san-diego-sheriff-outlines-reforms/509-4cff5e08-c3f3-4615-bba8-be4c10c48543
22. "San Diego Sheriff Kelly Martinez talks in-custody deaths, reforms with CBS 8: Full interview." CBS 8 San Diego, September 26, 2025. https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/investigations/san-diego-sheriff-reforms-high-jail-death-rates/509-02500405-88f1-4136-9d70-764614ba7a59
23. "Election 2022: San Diego County Sheriff Race." KPBS, October 10, 2022. https://www.kpbs.org/news/2022/10/10/san-diego-county-sheriff-gubernatorial-midterm-election-novemeber-2022
24. "Whoever Wins Top Two Law Enforcement Spots in November Will Serve for Six Years Not Four." Voice of San Diego, October 11, 2022 (on AB 759 and the six-year term). https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/10/11/whoever-wins-top-two-law-enforcement-spots-in-november-will-serve-for-six-years-not-four/
25. "San Diego Sheriff's Race Is an Open Contest for First Time In Decades." Voice of San Diego, May 12, 2022. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/05/12/san-diego-sheriffs-race-is-an-open-contest-for-first-time-in-decades/
26. Kelly Martinez profile, Ballotpedia (term dates and election history). https://ballotpedia.org/Kelly_Martinez
27. California AB 759 (2021–2022 session), as signed September 29, 2022. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB759
28. "New San Diego County report raises alarms over jail deaths, overcrowding, and rising inmate overdoses." 10News San Diego, April 2026. https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/new-san-diego-county-report-raises-alarms-over-jail-deaths-overcrowding-and-rising-inmate-overdoses
29. "Most San Diego Jail Deaths Ruled Non-Natural in Bombshell County Study." Hoodline, April 2026. https://hoodline.com/2026/04/most-san-diego-jail-deaths-ruled-non-natural-in-bombshell-county-study/
30. The Mountain-Whisper-Light: Statistics & Data Science. Firm profile and biographies. https://www.mwlight.com/ · https://www.mwlight.com/contact
31. Deitch, Michele Y. Faculty profile, University of Texas School of Law. https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/michele-y-deitch/ · LBJ School: https://lbj.utexas.edu/deitch-michele
32. San Diego County Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board (general site and complaint procedures). https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/clerb.html

Note on style: This article is written in a long-form investigative civic-accountability voice modeled on national broadsheets that emphasize government transparency. All quotations and statistical claims are sourced to the citations above and have been verified against the original reporting and primary documents (the State Auditor's report, CLERB's published correspondence, and federal court filings) where available. Where the Sheriff's Office and CLERB disagree on a legal question (notably whether County Administrative Code §340.15 authorizes record production for the study), the article presents both sides without adjudicating between them.