Methodology and sources
Every record here comes from the Texas Office of the Attorney General. This page states exactly what is included, what is left out, and how to get something corrected — because a public record is only useful if the reader knows what they are looking at.
Where the records come from
The primary source is the Texas Attorney General's custodial death report
(CDR) register, published at data.texas.gov as the
Custodial Deaths Report dataset, together with the individual reports the
Attorney General serves publicly.
Each entry on this site carries the person's name, the county, the date of death, the reporting agency, and the report number where the state assigned one. Where the state publishes the report itself, we host our own copy of that PDF so the record survives even if the original link stops working, and we link to the state's copy as the official source.
What the number on a county page means
The number at the top of a county page is the number of entries listed on that page — nothing else. It is not an estimate, not a projection, and not a rate. If a page says 25 deaths, it lists 25.
The same figure appears twice: in the large counter and in the sentence beneath the heading. They are generated from the same count, and a daily check fails if they ever disagree. That check exists because on 27 October 2026 three pages were found counting their pre-2016 rows twice, and the site had no way to notice on its own.
What this site does not show
Being explicit about the gaps is the point of this section:
- Deaths before 2016 have no report attached. The Attorney General serves reports only from its live ten-year register. Earlier deaths appear as a name and date, marked state record — report not served online before 2016. They are counted, but there is no document behind them here.
- The register is a rolling window. It covers the last ten years. Deaths that fell out of the window before this site recorded them are not present.
- Scope. The site is built around deaths in custody reported to the Attorney General. Where a death clearly falls outside that reporting scope it is not added. We are in the process of verifying, from the reports themselves, how the state classifies each death (pre-trial custody versus custody after conviction), because the register's own fields do not state it. Until that is complete, treat the scope as the deaths the Attorney General reports, not as a narrower category.
- Executions are not included — they are not custodial death reports under this programme.
- Duplicate report numbers. The state sometimes files two report numbers for one death. Those are merged into a single entry, with the second number recorded on the page as "also on file", rather than listed twice.
How the site keeps itself honest
Three things are checked automatically, and each one has been made to fail on purpose so we know it works:
| check | what it proves |
|---|---|
| counter = listed entries = prose, on every county page | the number at the top matches the records below it |
| map total = sum of the county pages | the map cannot drift behind the pages, which happened once |
| every county link resolves; every populated county is on the map | no record is reachable only by luck |
These run daily on the server, and the result is written to a log. If any of them disagrees, the job fails rather than reporting success.
Corrections and removal requests
If a record here is wrong — a misspelled name, a wrong county, a date that does not match the official report — tell us and it will be corrected against the source. If you are a family member and want a record reviewed, say so and it will be looked at by a person, not by a script.
Corrections are applied against the Attorney General's record: where this site and the state disagree, the state's document wins, and the correction is noted rather than silently overwritten.
How to cite this site
Cite the Attorney General's report as the source and this site as the index: "Texas Attorney General custodial death report [report number], via County Texas Watch". Every person page links to the official document for exactly that purpose.