A federal judge’s order clears the way for a civil rights lawsuit to proceed against the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office and former Sheriff Stanley Glanz. The judge ruled that jurors could find a “medical unit-wide attitude of inhumanity and indifference” to the suffering of inmate Elliott Williams, who died in the jail six days after languishing on the floor with a broken neck.
Shortly after his election, Sheriff Vic Regalado held a meeting with Jon Echols, a state lawmaker and campaign donor whose company plans to bid on the jail’s $5 million annual medical contract. An existing requirement on experience in large jails prevented Echols’ company from bidding. So Regalado sought and received changes in the Request for Proposals.
A new study ranks the nation’s ‘deadliest’ prosecutors, including Oklahoma’s Bob Macy (#2). The authors say their findings indicate “it was these individual personalities, not an excessive attachment to the death penalty by local residents, that drove up the rates of death sentencing.”
Nine of 14 candidates who’ve filed to run for Tulsa County Sheriff since last year did not file financial disclosure forms required by state law, but the state may not be able to do much about it anyway, an investigation by The Frontier has found.
Lawmakers never appropriated money to enforce the new law, an ethics commission director said.
The state Health Department says it will investigate why TCSO failed to report three out of seven serious inmate injuries since May in the Tulsa jail. Sheriff Regalado has said he’s following advice of the jail’s medical contractor.
Two eye-witnesses say Joshua Stand was not threatening a state trooper with a knife when he was fatally shot by the trooper in 2014. Their statements, contained in a new federal lawsuit, differ markedly from the OHP’s official version of the fatal shooting.
Asked why his office had not reported Horn’s death to the state jail inspector as required, Regalado indicated he was not familiar with that law.
A 58-year-old man, Leo Horn, died Saturday after being taken to the hospital from Tulsa Jail late Friday.
