Taylor Six covers courts and crime for the Lexington Herald-Leader. After a few assignments reporting on lawsuits related to in-custody jail deaths, she noticed a pattern.
“These (deaths) were taking place in a lot of the same facilities,” she said.
But there wasn’t much information readily available that could help her pin down the full scope of the issue.
So, she started digging in. After six months she found more than 230 people died in Kentucky’s jails between 2020 and 2024 — findings that experts deemed a “systemic failure.” Read her entire investigation here.
The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting interviewed Six about her recent investigation. You can listen to the conversation in the audio player above. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
Jake Ryan: So, one of the key findings was the causes of deaths, and your story lays it out — most of the deaths that you identified were listed as natural causes. But what's the problem that you found with that?
Taylor Six: If you look at a death certificate or an autopsy report and it says natural, at first blush you think, ‘OK , well, you know, that's all there is to it.’ But the more I looked into the individuals who passed away and subsequently found lawsuits that their loved ones or next of kin would have filed, it gave this narrative of exactly what they went through in the moments leading up to their death. And you just see that a lot of these folks have pre-existing conditions that they are living with that they may or may not be aware of. So when they go into this facility, this local jail, they are then at the discretion of those individuals. A lot of times those staff, to maybe no fault of their own, but just the design of the structure, are not equipped to differentiate between a medical emergency, a withdrawal or an overdose. They have a hard time seeing the difference, and for whatever reason, they may not seek medical help initially. There's a quote in the article that summarized it so perfectly — “when you see a natural death ruling. Use that as a way to look deeper inside the conditions of that jail.”
JR: The people that you talked with, tell me a little bit about what they said when it comes to fixing this issue of people dying in Kentucky's jails.
TS: Sure, there were two major points I think that I was able to take away from it. One of the big things was being able to notice the difference between what is an urgent medical necessity and need, as opposed to an overdose or withdrawal — both of which are urgent medical needs —but is it a life threatening condition that is pre existing, or is it one of these circumstances that may have an external factor paired with it? And the second, it was a little bit more broad. It was discussing alternatives to putting people in jails, looking at alternative sentencing options, or looking at more utilization of rehabilitation efforts for folks to reduce the overcrowding and reduce the number of people that they have to care for. So, those were two of the things that came up for me, but I really hoped that the story would kind of prompt that question for folks to be able to to think about and just kind of see, you know, what could we do?
JR: Well, it was a really great story, and I hope you do keep following this thread,
TS: I'll try my best.
