Behind the story: How the Herald-Leader investigated 17 years of Kentucky jail deaths
When 32-year-old Brandon Baker died last year soon after leaving the Madison County jail, bigger questions began to surface.
Which Kentucky jails have the most in-custody deaths? Does Kentucky track that data? What — if anything — can the state do to intervene if jails fail to provide sufficient health care to inmates?
So Herald-Leader reporter Taylor Six launched a six-month investigation to answer some of those questions.
Throughout her investigation, she submitted open records requests to the Kentucky Department of Corrections for deaths at each of Kentucky’s 77 jails between 2008 and 2024.
The documents, labeled as “death logs,” are recorded by the Kentucky Department of Corrections, but the state does not publish them. They’re obtainable only by request though the Kentucky Open Records Act.
Of the 234 people who died in jails between 2020 and 2024, about 70% had not been convicted of the charge for which they were being held. They were awaiting trial and presumed innocent by the courts.
The next step was to compile the data in a digestible format and do a lot of counting.
Six determined a few particular jails stood out.
Of the 234 deaths in Kentucky jails since 2008, the year the state began compiling jail death data, 67 happened in the Fayette, Madison, Rowan, Perry, Laurel and Whitley County facilities.
She then submitted additional records requests to those jails for death certificates and autopsy records for each death, and she created a database of their age, race, causes, manners and dates of death.
In all, Six sent about three dozen open records requests to state and local officials for this story.
She interviewed five lawyers who represented families in wrongful death lawsuits against local jails statewide.
She exchanged several emails with Department of Corrections officials, but they repeatedly declined to sit down for a full interview.
Six also spoke with two jailers and toured the Laurel County Corrections Center.
Meanwhile, during the six months she worked on the project, she continued to write daily stories about more deaths — and resulting lawsuits — inside Kentucky jails.
Taylor Six is a Lexington native and an award-winning criminal justice journalist at the Herald-Leader, where she has worked since May 2022.
