PORTLAND, Ore. — Advocates are calling for an independent investigation into the deaths of eight inmates at Multnomah County jails within the past 12 months. Five of those have occurred in just the past three months.
It is an unusually high number of deaths, and the sheriff's office announced a plan of action on Thursday that includes an independent assessment of its jail operations.
The latest inmate death was on Tuesday at the Multnomah County Detention Center in downtown Portland. The sheriff's office said 36-year-old Clemente Pineda was found unresponsive in his cell. Despite lifesaving efforts, he was pronounced dead.
That's how the sheriff's office has described most of the nine in-custody deaths since the beginning of 2022: found unresponsive in their cells and pronounced dead. To underline the seriousness of the problem, there were no in-custody deaths in all of 2020 and 2021.
Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell put out a statement last month saying that her office takes the care of inmates seriously, and that the deaths are traumatic and distressing to everyone, but added that "jails are a microcosm of society, reflecting trends we see and feel across the region and country."
"My commitment remains firm to identify and implement solutions to prevent deaths in our jails and achieve our collective health and safety goals," Sheriff Morrisey O'Donnell said in a new statement, released Thursday.
The county needs to act quickly, said Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center.
“It's tragic. The urgency with which we need to get information and some transparency about what's going on is high,” said Singh. “We need to have an independent entity, whether it's the Oregon State Police or some other outside agency, come in, review, investigate and produce the information publicly so we can all understand what happened.”
According to the OJRC, there's been no year since 2010 in which as many as five people have died in Multnomah County custody. The sheriff's office reported four in-custody deaths in 2010 and again in 2015.
In her Thursday statement, Morrisey O'Donnell announced several steps being taken to address the issue, including formally requesting that the National Institute of Corrections perform an assessment of Multnomah County's correctional facilities and their operations. A sheriff’s spokesperson maintained that the move was not in response to the OJRC and Multnomah’s Defenders, Inc. call for an independent investigation, and that the office had been in talks with the institute for the past few weeks.
A few answers on the circumstances of some of those deaths just came from the county after KGW requested information from the medical examiner's office. Going back to May 9 of 2022, two deaths were found to be of natural causes, and two were suicides. Only one was attributed to drugs, listed as an accident due to "acute cocaine poisoning."
Results on the remaining four deaths, all since mid-May of this year, are still pending. The sheriff's office identified those individuals as 31-year-old George Allen Walker, 53-year-old Kashi Abram Harmon, 31-year-old Josiah G. Pierce and 36-year-old Clemente Pineda.
Morrisey O'Donnell stated Thursday that toxicology results are still pending in these cases, but that early indications suggest some of the deaths may be drug-related.
"Outside of prisons and jails, drug overdose deaths are at historic levels, and the trend of drug use, primarily driven by opioids, including counterfeit fentanyl, is reflected in corrections environments," the sheriff said. "Synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, are dramatically more potent, more addictive and deadlier than heroin or other drugs."
Whatever the cause of death, Singh thinks the list of the dead is far too long.
"I think first and foremost when individuals are in custodial settings like this, highly supervised settings, it should be extremely rare for individuals to be dying in custody,” he said.
Along with announcing the request for the NIC assessment, the sheriff on Thursday laid out some short- and long-term plans for preventing inmate deaths, including increasing the search criteria for contraband and expanded Narcan availability at the jails.
Long term, Morrisey O’Donnell wants more technology like tablets for inmates, to provide access to family and educational and vocational training.