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Posted 10/21/2025

People are dying in police custody. It doesn't seem like something that should happen as often as it does because police have sworn an oath to serve and protect people. However, there have been several instances where people have died or been killed while in the custody of the police. The oath that a police officer takes varies by jurisdiction, but the same core principles typically remain intact. One fundamental part of a police officer's pledge is to safeguard lives and property. Impartiality and fairness are also included in the language of most oaths, usually requiring the officer to enforce the law without consideration of a person's race, color, creed, or other personal characteristics.

Police are charged with defending the United States Constitution and the Constitution of their state. The Constitution entitles people to due process, no matter what offense they have been accused of. In the following video, you will see Officer Matthew Rodriguez viciously assault 19-year-old suspect Jacquan Smith while he's being fingerprinted.

Fortunately, Mr. Smith wasn't killed. The video above serves as an example of assaults that occur while people are in police custody, deemed as "brutal and outrageous" by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Moran, prosecutor on the Rodriguez case. Smith filed a 50 million dollar lawsuit against the city of Warren, Michigan, and Officer Rodriguez was terminated and later sentenced to a year and a day. Smith could have easily died as his nearly lifeless body was tossed into a cell. The judge told Rodriguez during sentencing that it was his third such violation. Read more. Click Here. 

Few may remember Victor Hill, the former sheriff of Clayton County in Georgia, who was convicted on 6 counts of depriving inmates of their constitutional rights in 2022 by having them strapped to a chair for hours. Hill was sentenced to 18 months but, since his release, is now considering a bid for Congress and claims he wants to clean up jails, saying, "Whether the person is guilty or not, he deserves to be in a clean environment, not an environment where there's black mold coming down from the wall in the bathrooms and it's flooded like where I was at." People definitely shouldn't expect to be viciously beaten by officers either.

A lot of people weren't as lucky as Mr. Smith. The Attorney General was instructed back in 1994 to compile and publish a list of statistics on police using deadly force, but it never came to fruition. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 17,358 individuals in custody died during the period from 2007 to 2010.

Moreover, several people have died in police custody only to have their deaths misclassified. In Maryland alone, 36 deaths of individuals in police custody were found to be homicides... Click Here.

In recent news, Doug Martin, a former first-round NFL Draft pick and two-time Pro Bowl running back, died on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025, in police custody. Martin played for 7 years in the NFL. Apparently, he went to his neighbor's house, a struggle ensued with the police, and Martin was unresponsive afterwards. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. Due to modern technology, the majority of us have witnessed firsthand people being beaten by police as more and more incidents are caught on camera. It must be understood that when anyone is engaged in this type of activity, they are indeed committing a crime. For a police officer, they are violating their oath as well.