First, reports hit the web that she ingested a "large" amount of marijuana in her system. A very tightly controlled narrative is being crafted by the Texas county where she was arrested. And for some reason, one of their local judges is releasing information to the media directly in an attempt to influence the case. It reminds one of the Ferguson city officials that continually leaked info on Mike Brown's alleged crimes/character traits in order to sway public opinion.
http://www.khou.com/...
The Waller County judge released some new details on Facebook Thursday as it pertains to the death investigation of Sandra Bland.
The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled Bland's death a suicide by hanging, though friends and family dispute those findings. Texas Rangers and the FBI are investigating her death. Bland's body is in Chicago with her family as they prepare for her funeral.
In the Facebook post, Waller County Judge Trey Duhon explained that he wanted to clear up some of what he calls "misinformation" that is out there.
The county judge said Bland's toxicology tests showed what Duhon calls "a very high level of marijuana in her system." He added that's relevant to Bland's physical and mental state at the time of her death.
Since there is no scientific link between adults over 25 using marijuana and suicide, any more than, say, alcohol use....it's clear why this local judge is trying to influence the case. Set the narrative.
Given all the attention given here and elsewhere to the fact that the sheriff of Waller County was already fired for racism, it's hard to believe this crafted narrative being pushed by local officials of a corrupt precinct.
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
In 2004, students at Prairie View A&M fought and won a battle over their right to vote in the county. District Attorney Oliver Kitzman claimed the students were ineligible to vote in Waller County and could only cast ballots in their home counties, despite clear Supreme Court precedent showing they were allowed to register. Kitzman threatened to prosecute any student who voted. It wasn’t his first clash with black residents, who accused the district attorney of deploying a range of intimidation tactics. Kitzman denied any racism, and told The Los Angeles Times that any racial issues in the county could be solved “if we took several of the players and sent them to Los Angeles.”
The level of distrust is high. I've watched today on twitter as a counter-narrative has sprung up, rife with speculation and distrust. Thousands of users on the #sandrabland hashtag are pointing out what they perceive as edits of the jailhouse booking photo. This comes on the heels of the claims made by the director of "Selma" that the dashcam video, full of inconsistencies, was edited. Many others are also concerned about time lapses in the jailhouse video, along with the obvious lapses in the dashcam video.
In fact, a viral number of tweets in the past hour point to the assertion that Bland's booking photo is questionable. She was photographed in an orange jumpsuit, and not in street clothes, as is the norm across the U.S. [ as someone who's been arrested multiple times for marijuana and still has copies of one of my mugshots, I can confirm: you are booked and processed and photographed in your street clothes, not jail clothes. In fact, you don't get jail jumpsuits unless you are sentenced to time after seeing the judge. Before then, you sit in city jail in your street clothes which have already been searched by personnel]
Users are claiming that Bland was already dead at the time of her booking photo, and that evidence in the photo- such as the way the jumpsuit sags around her shoulder blades and her hair hangs backwards instead of downwards- support the thesis that Bland was already dead at the time of the photo. Buzzfeed re-posted this theory. https://twitter.com/...
It's natural that questions like this would spring up when a racist Law enforcement agency makes a violent arrest against an unarmed motorist simply for failing to use a turn signal. I've spent 3 days in jail on a warrant for failing to pay a ticket for not having a train ticket. Most white americans have no clue how easy it is for local cops to lock up citizens for multiple days on minor infractions, or even nothing at all.
One of my main concerns is the claim that she had a trash bag. In the jails I was in, you are not permitted to have anything other than food and clothes and perhaps magazines/newspapers. There may or may not be a phone in the cell. The only plastic bag you are allowed to have is a small one used to contain lunch. Large trash bags are not available in a city cell, but they are in county and state jails where prisoners can walk around and access trash cans.
a look at twitter today:
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a press conference was just held to repeat the department's claim that she died from hanging herself with a trash bag, and they made sure to point out that she had "cutting" marks, and produced a document that a cop had marked to show that Bland tried to kill herself with "pills" in the past over a "lost baby".
Many facebook users are on the official page of Waller County Sheriffs with questions about the disgraced sheriff, and some of the strange and questionable photos publicly posted to the page. They also point out the discrepancies between bland's booking photo in an orange jumpsuit, and the other prisoners' photos in street clothes.
https://www.facebook.com/...