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Texas Department of Public Safety to fire trooper indicted for perjury in Sandra Bland Arrest.
A Texas state trooper who stopped and arrested Sandra Bland last summer — days before she was found hanging in her jail cell — has been indicted.
Trooper Brian T. Encinia was indicted Wednesday on a perjury charge, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, according to Warren Diepraam, a spokesman for the Waller County district attorney’s office.
The grand jury declined to indict on a charge of aggravated perjury, which in Texas is a third-degree felony, said Diepraam, an assistant district attorney.
Bland, 28, was found hanging by a plastic bag in her jail cell three days after she was arrested July 10 during a routine traffic stop about 55 miles west of Houston.
The grand jury met for the fourth time Wednesday morning after deciding last month that no felony was committed by the Waller County Sheriff’s Office or jailers in connection with Bland’s death.
Shawn McDonald is one of five Houston-area lawyers appointed as independent special prosecutors to present the case to the grand jury and will now prosecute Encinia.
Bland’s family and activists have questioned how the traffic stop was conducted and whether Bland, an outspoken online advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, killed herself, as authorities have concluded. At the time of her arrest, Bland had just accepted a job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University.
Encinia pulled her over for making an improper lane change near the university’s entrance, and the confrontation between the two was captured on the officer’s dashboard camera.
Bland was taken to the Waller County Jail in Hempstead where, three days later, unable to make $500 bail, she was discovered in her cell. After an autopsy by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston, officials ruled her death a suicide.
Cannon Lambert, an attorney for the Bland family, had been doubtful that the panel would indict Encinia, though he said the charge they selected was the “lowest on the totem pole.”
He said based on dashboard camera footage of the incident, Encinia should have been charged with false arrest, battery and abuse of police powers.
“We have a lot more questions,” he said.
