State of Texas: Death, debate and 'A Hanging on Backbone Creek'

(AUSTIN) Nexstar — In 2015, Rick Hill was busy launching a new career in the Piney Woods of East Texas – Brazos County justice of the peace. The retired teacher and principal had campaigned and won the judicial post as “a school administrator (who) listened to both sides of an issue, weighed the evidence, and rendered fair and just decisions.”

To hold the office, Hill had to be a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years old, a resident of Texas for at least a year and his Precinct 3 for at least six months. He must also have no felony convictions and be mentally competent.

“What I tell people is – to get elected (justice of the peace) in the state of Texas – basically, you have to have a pulse,” Hill joked. “As long as you can keep getting elected, you can stay in office.”

Still, the role came with steep expectations. Like his counterparts across the state, Hill would be on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays. And his duties would be wide-ranging and plenty.

“Ninety percent of all the cases filed at any level in the state of Texas are found at our level,” Hill said. “For the vast majority of Texans, the only experience they will have in a justice court system is at our level… I like to kind of consider (justices of the peace) as the landfill of cases that no one else has to do.”

Texas justices of the peace hold civil, criminal and traffic trials. They sign misdemeanor and search warrants, conduct truancy court and perform marriages. They oversee complaints in many areas, including parks and wildlife and the health department. They conduct bail examinations, issue emergency protective orders and hold several other magistrate hearings, including stolen property, driver’s license suspensions, towing, animal cruelty and even dangerous dog determinations.

In counties like Brazos with no medical examiner, justices of the peace also hold inquests – which can be a very unfamiliar process for many who are newly elected. Hill had no medical or legal background when he took office, but he faced his first inquest just two days into the job.

“I go in and observe the body,” he explained. “(I) consult with law enforcement, medical personnel, family members… It was a murder, which made it kind of easy. With any kind of criminal activity like that, I’m going to order an autopsy.”

Now in his third four-year term, Hill has carried out more than a thousand inquests. Annually, he and his county’s three other justices each send around 300 bodies for autopsies west to Travis County, which contracts with several counties with no medical examiners of their own. Counties may also send bodies to private medical examiners.

“I think that some judges order autopsies when they're not as comfortable,” Hill said. “And that's the great part of our job. If we're not certain, we can order an autopsy; the county pays for it.”

Today, a comparison of county audits shows some spending as much as $4,700 on a single autopsy, a cost that can vary depending on transport expenses and the location in the state.

“Ultimately, it comes down to the discretion of the justice of the peace, but it's a matter of being trained,” Hill said.

While the Justices of the Peace and Constables Association of Texas – the state’s largest organization of elected officials – has been educating its members since 1958, the level of learning opportunities dramatically increased in 1971. That year, through a grant from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, JPCA created the Texas Justice Court Training Center housed at Texas State University with a mission of “quality education” for justices of the peace, constables and court personnel.

For most of his time in office, Hill has served on the training center’s faculty, traveling the state and using his teaching skills to instruct other judges. When first elected, a judge must undergo 80 hours of training, plus an additional 20 for each subsequent year through live courses, webinars and other workshops on a variety of topics, including inquests.

When C.B. Wall was Burnet County justice of the peace, the training center – and its resources and requirements – did not exist. Census records reference Wall’s real estate business before his first election, but there is nothing to indicate he had any medical training. Hill said, back then, new judges “got the keys, then it was like, ‘Good luck!”

“From 1965 to today is like the dark ages… to the modern world,” he said. “And every year that goes by, we try to get better at what we're doing.”

‘Order an autopsy’

The role of justice of the peace has gradually evolved over the last 200 years in Texas. According to state archives, the position existed well before statehood “since the earliest days of the colony,” introduced by a man known as the “Father of Texas” – Stephen F. Austin – through his Code of 1824. Justices were then included in the Constitution of the Republic of Texas and in every Constitution to follow.

“(They) historically are individuals in the community where, if a cow wandered over into somebody else's property and there was an argument over who the cow belonged to, (the determination) went to a justice of the peace,” Hill said.

But as responsibilities in the role increased, so did concerns about justices misusing their authority. In 1965, Texans first had a way to officially complain through a newly-created State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

In the past 25 years – the timeframe of data readily available to the public online – the commission has investigated and administered more than 400 disciplinary actions against justices of the peace – including sanctions, suspensions and resignations. Some were related to death inquests – a potential dilemma no other state faces in quite the same way.

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s Collaborating Office for Medical Examiners and Coroners, 23 states and the District of Columbia primarily use medical examiners to conduct autopsies to investigate and certify deaths. The majority of counties in 20 states utilize elected or appointed officials called coroners, who have some training for that purpose. (Several of those states have a mixture of the two systems, and in Washington State there is no majority between the roles.)

Death investigations in six states, including Texas, fall mainly on other elected county officials, like the county attorney or sheriff. But Texas is the only one to use the multi-faceted role of justice of the peace.

That obligation comes from the portion of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure known as the “Inquest Law,” allowing justices to investigate deaths, including those that were: unattended, unnatural or unidentified; in prison or jail; caused by unlawful means; suspected suicides; and children younger than six.

Hill said, generally, certain unnatural deaths should almost always warrant an autopsy.

“Suicides, homicides, traffic fatalities, young people who really we don't know what happened – you order an autopsy, because you want to know the manner of death, cause of death,” he said.

But the ability to make that decision also means many death investigations never include autopsies. For instance, in the last five years in Burnet County where Daynon Lewis died, justices of the peace have investigated nearly 800 deaths, sending less than half to medical examiners elsewhere for autopsies.

Oversight of justices of the peace, death inquests and autopsy orders may be lacking in Texas. There is no central repository for the public to request related information, with each county maintaining its own records – which are sometimes incomplete, heavily redacted or costly to obtain.

Recent reporting has highlighted problems with justices of the peace in unnoticed murders and suicides, flawed COVID-19 death findings and unidentified migrant remains, while academic studies have pointed out justices’ failures in nursing home foul play and oversights with state death data.

Further tracking any potentially troublesome trends can be challenging, even by securing individual death certificates – which are sealed by law from the public for 25 years after each death – as our team found. That means the most recent death certificates available in Texas date back to 1999.

‘Not practicing medicine’

Based in San Antonio, the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office became the state’s first such entity in 1956 following the passage of the Texas Medical Examiner Act. That measure allowed counties of more than 250,000 to change from the justice of the peace system for investigating “violent and unexpected” deaths to a medical examiner system.

Today, just 14 of Texas’ 254 counties have medical examiner’s offices. Options are limited but necessary for justices who want to order autopsies.

“Obviously, (justices of the peace) understand that they’re not practicing medicine,” said Dr. Reade Quinton, vice president of the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) and former deputy chief medical examiner in Dallas County. “So really it's just understanding the death investigation system. What should have an autopsy, what shouldn't?”

To carry out an autopsy, the state’s criminal code specifies the strict requirements and expectations of a medical examiner. Anyone appointed to that role must be a physician licensed by the state, and “to the greatest extent possible, the medical examiner shall be appointed from persons having training and experience in pathology, toxicology, histology and other medico-legal sciences.”

NAME explains further on its website that medical examiners are most often forensic pathologists: experts in determining cause and manner of death. They are specially trained to perform autopsies, “making sure that the appropriate procedures and evidence collection techniques are applied to the body.” This includes an external and internal examination of the body, “taking small samples of tissues to examine under the microscope for abnormal changes not visible to the naked eye,” along with other testing involving x-rays, toxicological analysis and more.

Forensic pathologists are also trained in multiple areas beyond traditional medicine, including “toxicology, firearms examination (wound ballistics), trace evidence, forensic serology and DNA technology,” according to NAME. This all comes after earning college and medical school degrees, then spending additional years on various types of pathology and practical experience, supervised by others in that role. One must also pass an examination by the American Board of Pathology to become certified.

“Nationally, we only have probably about 750 practicing forensic pathologists across the entire country,” Quinton said. “Texas has got a lot of them, and we're still understaffed.”

As the state’s population increases, so does its death count. Some observers have suggested judges in some counties may be overworked and overburdened with massive caseloads, ready to relinquish the inquest part of their jobs to medical examiners completely.

As nearby Austin’s population spills into Williamson County, justices there have been the latest to tackle the topic, advocating in recent months for a medical examiner and lately landing on hiring supplementary death investigators to help them with inquests.

Updates to state laws and the census have increased that population threshold, now requiring counties with 2.5 million people or more to establish a medical examiner’s office. It is a rule debated in recent legislative sessions – and is already on the political agenda for the next session in January.

‘Time to take action’

The population threshold has risen since the law was first enacted in 1955. In 2019, Texas lawmakers raised it from one million to two million people, which just four counties exceed: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar. The change meant three additional counties near that previous million mark no longer needed to establish a medical examiner office.

However, most on that list already had one – except Denton County in North Texas.

“Denton County is one of the fastest growing counties in the country and is rapidly approaching a population now of one million people,” then-Rep. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, told a legislative panel that year, as he presented the proposal. “If they were required to establish their own medical examiner… it would initially cost approximately $4 million to address this issue.”

Parker has since risen politically to the Texas Senate and now represents a much larger constituency in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs. His successful passage of the 2019 bill allowed Denton County – and its taxpayers – to avoid the new population requirement.

“My Denton County judge and commissioners said… we can partner with our neighboring Tarrant County and get terrific services, taking care of all of our people at a fraction of the cost,” Sen. Parker told our team.

Tarrant County, with its own established office, has a longstanding partnership with neighboring Parker, Johnson and Denton Counties to fund and operate a regional service. A recent report showed Denton County paid $662,000 to take part in 2023.

“So those kind of cooperative arrangements locally make a lot of sense, and that's the reason why I like to maintain local control whenever possible,” Parker said, regarding the potential for filing new legislation in 2025. “But again, we're looking at what the best way is to address the issue for the state as a whole.”

A new bill could pave the way for more counties to enter regional agreements, opening up medical examiner services regularly to more places in need across the state. The model is something both Quinton and Hill predicted to be a promising idea in the future – for autopsies, county budgets and the already-stretched justice of the peace system in Texas.

“My perspective is when you see locally… that your (justices of the peace) are being overwhelmed, because of the workload that they have – well, then it's time to take action,” Parker added.

But most Texas counties are nowhere close to an existing medical examiner’s office, so a regional option might not be an immediate possibility. Critics worked last legislative session to lower the population requirement back to one million to force more growing counties to build their own offices sooner. Their efforts failed.

“We found two elderly folks that (other officials) wanted to… as their normal procedure, send off to the funeral home,” Fort Bend County’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Stephen Pustilnik, told a House panel in 2023. “They were homicides. They're being prosecuted, because we brought in investigators who were trained medical examiners.”

The Fort Bend office is one of the state’s newest, established in 2019. Adding others, Pustilnik said, would lead to similar outcomes as his story and “improve everything for the entire state.”

“To get as many people under a medical examiner system and out of the 19th-century death investigations,” he added, “I consider it a moral imperative.”

KXAN’s Kathleen Dunbaugh, Eric Lefenfeld, Chris Nelson, Robert Sims, Chris Wilkerson and Kate Winkle contributed to this report and program.