Sandra Bland ... alive

Sandra Bland ... alive

In a nation where less than 1 percent of officers who use lethal force are ever successfully prosecuted for misconduct, our nation's civil lawsuit system ends up being where the price is paid for police violence and discrimination.

Such is the case with Sandra Bland as her family is now filing a federal lawsuit against not only the officer who arrested and assaulted her last month, but also other government officials the family believes are responsible for her death.

The state has already determined that the arresting officer violated policies.

The state then determined that the jail was violating policies.

The state then had to re-release the arrest video after it appeared to have been edited.

The state then requested that the family allow them to perform another autopsy after Bland's body had already been shipped to Chicago for her funeral.

Now several experts have come out publicly to state that Waller County, Texas, officials misrepresented the amount of marijuana in Bland's system when she died.



Psychoactive drug researcher Carl Hart of Columbia University, however, said Bland's levels are comparable to the baseline, or sober state, in many of his research subjects who are regular users and disputed the officials' interpretation. "Simply put," Hart said in an email, "Waller County officials exaggerated Bland's THC amounts and this gave the public a false impression of THC's role in her death."

This exaggeration is particularly egregious, in part, because it appears to show a trend of deceit by the county. On multiple occasions, the district attorney there stated that Bland's blood tests showed so much marijuana that she may have eaten a large volume of it in the jail or smoked it somehow while incarcerated.

These accusations, we now know, are garbage.

Simply put, it's hard believe anything the county says about Sandra Bland.