The Fulton County Jail where Trump will be booked has seen 23 deaths in custody in less than 4 years

• Former President Donald Trump is expected to be booked at a notoriously inhumane Atlanta jail.
• The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into conditions at the jail.

The Fulton County Jail is notorious for its inhumane and filthy conditions — and is now the target of a Justice Department investigation.

It is also the jail where former President Donald Trump is expected be booked Thursday on criminal charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

A grand jury indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants on charges including racketeering, conspiracy, and making false statements, and Fulton County Sheriff Patrick "Pat" Labat has said the former president will be treated "like everyone else" processed through the facility.

Trump has a $200,000 bond in the case, meaning he will likely be released without seeing the inside of a cell at the jail known as "Rice Street."

But records obtained by Insider also show that, for some — especially those held there pretrial who can't afford bond — a stay at the Atlanta facility can be deadly.

Filthy conditions

In a little over three years, 23 people died in custody at the jail, peaking at four deaths in one week, and two deaths in one day, according to incident reports obtained by Insider through a public records request.

The facility houses around 3,000 people, nearly half of whom have not been convicted of a crime, according to a study by the ACLU.

"We're just letting people literally rot away there," Sarah Flack, a defense attorney in Atlanta, told Insider.

Flack, who has represented several people incarcerated at the jail, said jail staff have a severe disregard of lives there.

The Atlanta jail came into the spotlight last September, when LaShawn Thompson was found dead in his cell. His family alleges he was "eaten alive" by insects and bed bugs. Insider previously obtained reports showing jail staffers noticed Thompson's "deteriorating" conditions, but did nothing to help him, and his family has since agreed to a $4 million settlement in the case.

Additional incident reports obtained by Insider in May show Thompson, 35, was among 14 other people who died in custody in 2022.

An independent autopsy found Thompson's cause of death to be cardiac arrhythmia, resulting from "a mix of dehydration, rapid weight loss, and malnutrition, complicated by untreated schizophrenia."

Thomson was housed in the jail's psychiatric wing and was at the jail on a misdemeanor charge of simple battery.

Nine days after his death, another incarcerated man was killed after a man detained there stabbed him in the neck.

On September 22, a 33-year-old man was found laying in a puddle of his own blood after a fight with another man ended in a stabbing. Another incarcerated person notified staffers via intercom that a body was laid out on the floor. A medical nurse told him there was no need to start CPR because the man was "already dead for some time."

One month after Thompson's death, an incarcerated man was found wrapped in a blanket from head to toe, with a swollen neck and "blue straps tied tightly around his entire body like a mummy" alone with his cellmate, according to an internal report.

The Fulton County Sheriff's Office Criminal Investigation Division was contacted due to "elements of foul play existing," the report said.

The jail didn't comment on the number of deaths or conditions at the jail. The DOJ said it didn't have any further comment.

In under four years, 23 people have died at the Fulton County Jail

Of the nearly two dozen people who died while incarcerated, four died by suicide, three by homicide, and two from drug use, according to Fulton County Jail's findings.

Eleven died of natural illnesses — including four seizures and one COVID-related death.

The causes of death for the last three either remain under investigation or were undetermined.

Many of them were found unresponsive in their cells, either by jail staffers during rounds or by cellmates, before they were transferred to the local hospital and pronounced dead.

One week, from November 17 to November 23 2022, was particularly deadly. Four people died in the jail.

The first, a 32-year-old woman, was found dead in her cell on November 17.

Then, on November 21, Christopher Gray, 36, was seen on video footage collapsing after smoking a joint shared by five other people, a separate incident report showed.

"Inmate Gray willingly smoked an unknown substance on camera, and, it seems, paid the ultimate price for doing so," Deputy Sergeant R. Williams II said in his report on the in custody death.

A jail spokesman later told Insider that there is no evidence that the death was caused by the drugs, despite Williams' report.

Two men died on November 23: one by cardiac arrest, the other by homicide.

One of the men, who was 32 years old, was found unresponsive "on the floor with his hands and feet tied." Captain Jamarl Johnson said his cellmate couldn't be interviewed "due to his mental health."

The men died 18 hours apart.

The three men who died of suicide were found in their cells with fabric from their mattress cover or clothing tied to their metal bunks. In 2021, staffers noted feeling surprised by a nurse's refusal to perform CPR after one of them, a 19-year-old man, was cut loose from his bunk, citing that she had bad knees.

"I was concerned about that due to my training, medical staff is to take lead and direct medical aide," Deputy Sheriff Lieutenant Robert Grady wrote in a report.

Non-fatal violence is also a threat at the jail: In the last year, the jail had 11 fires, 534 fights, and 114 stabbings, Atlanta Magazine reported. During a commission meeting for additional funding last April, Sheriff Pat Labat rolled in a wheelbarrow full of shanks, and said one inmate gets stabbed per day, on average.

This year hasn't proved much safer for those in the jail. Three people died in the first five months of 2023; all of them found unresponsive in their cells.

Fallon McClure, Deputy Director of Policy & Advocacy at the ACLU of Georgia, said that these human rights issues will continue unless trends of over-incarceration are addressed.

"We as a whole have been missing the mark on this because we haven't been asking why all these people were in the jail in the first place," she said.

The organization's analysis into the jail's conditions last year found that nearly half of the jail's population have not been formally charged with a crime, and 12% remained in custody because they can't pay bail.

"Until we start looking at like the drivers of incarceration and fixing systematic failures, we're going to continue to have overcrowding," she said. "And when you continue to have overcrowding, unfortunately, you're going to continue to have deaths."

The Department of Justice is investigating

On July 13, the Justice Department announced that it is opening an investigation into living conditions and health care at the jail.

In a statement about the investigation, the DOJ cited details of Thompson's death as justification, along with allegations that violence and excessive force are prevalent and have led to serious injuries and homicides.

The department will examine "living conditions, medical and mental health care, use of excessive force, and protection from violence," as well as possible discrimination of people with psychiatric disabilities, the statement said.

Fulton County officials and Sheriff Pat Labat have pledged to cooperate with the investigation, according to the DOJ.

Terrica Ganzy, Executive Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights said the investigation is a step in the right direction, but elected officials continue to ignore the public's outcry over conditions at the jail.

"This is a significant step toward a reckoning for the lives tragically and senselessly lost, and for the many people who continue to suffer rampant indignity and abuse in Fulton jails," she said.