Updated at 6:32 p.m. with a DPS news release about Coleman's questions during the hearing.
AUSTIN — Lawmakers on Friday grilled state law enforcement officials about a newly released video clip in the Sandra Bland case, taken from her perspective, that her family's attorney said was not turned over to them during legal proceedings.
In an unusually late committee hearing three days from the end of the legislative session, Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, accused Department of Public Safety officials of either withholding the video from lawmakers or trying to conceal it by burying it in the mounds of documents the agency sent them.
"I tried to go into the disc you sent me and I couldn't make heads or tails of it," said Coleman, who chairs the House County Affairs Committee and conducted hearings on the Bland case beginning after her death in 2015. He passed a criminal justice law named after her in 2017.
DPS officials said information about the Bland case was given to Coleman, and later Friday issued a news release detailing what they sent him. But Coleman said he had not seen the video until its release this month and did not believe it had been made available to him.
"I want everything," Coleman said.
"You'll have everything," replied DPS Director Steve McCraw.
McCraw told the panel that the video was not initially turned over after it was discovered in September 2015 because it was part of a Texas Rangers investigation into Trooper Brian Encinia. Encinia arrested and violently handled Bland before her death in the Waller County jail and was later fired from DPS.
Coleman said the video should have been made available to the family's attorney, Cannon Lambert, and to lawmakers who were investigating the case. DPS officials assured the panel that the video was made available to Lambert in the civil litigation in October 2015 but admitted that they had not provided it to lawmakers.
"One thing we didn’t deliver to you was the thumb drive with all of Sandra Bland’s data," McCraw told Coleman. "We didn’t do that."
The criminal investigation into Encinia was closed in July 2017, nearly a year after Bland's family had settled a federal lawsuit with DPS and the Waller County jail over her death for $1.9 million. As part of that settlement, the family was required to return all the evidence given to them. But they said the newly released video was not included in that evidence.
The family is now calling for the criminal case against the trooper to be reexamined because Lambert didn't see the video, which was obtained by the Investigative Network, a nonprofit news organization, and aired on WFAA-TV (Channel 8).
Encinia was indicted by a grand jury for perjury, but the charge was dropped in exchange for him giving up his license and agreeing never to work as a police officer again.
Friday's hearing
Lawmakers Friday appeared concerned that state officials violated protocol by not turning over the video to them. McCraw told the panel that the department had been "absolutely transparent throughout this entire process."
Phillip Adkins, DPS general counsel, said an 820-gigabyte hard drive that included data from Bland's phone was turned over to the family's attorney in the civil litigation.
But Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, pressed Adkins, saying the family's lawyer had not seen the video. Thierry, who is a lawyer, said the only reasons she would not have seen information produced by an opposing lawyer were if it had not been produced or she missed it.
"I take him at his word that he has not seen it," Adkins said, before suggesting that the family's attorney may have missed the video in the mass of information provided to them.
Later, lawyers with the state attorney general's office said Waller County prosecutors who handled the criminal charges against Encinia turned over the cellphone data to the Bland family's attorney, noting that they would be "uncomfortable commenting" on how they prepared that information for legal discovery.
But the state lawyers conceded that the information may not have been indexed appropriately to specifically point out the 39-second clip from Bland's perspective, which would have been of high interest to the family's lawyer.
Coleman said he'd call another committee hearing to hear testimony from Waller County prosecutors. And he expressed his frustration at not having all the information in the case clearly laid out to him by DPS and the attorney general's office.
DPS responds to Coleman
Late Friday, DPS issued a news release containing an email from McCraw to Coleman answering some of the questions the lawmaker raised during the hearing. McCraw said DPS had complied with a 2016 request from Coleman for data on approximately 2 million traffic stops between January and October of that year.
"It is likely that this is the data dump that you referenced," McCraw wrote. "Your office did not ask for information specific to the Sandra Bland case as part of this particular request."
In a later request in June 2017, McCraw wrote, Coleman's staff requested the Texas Rangers report on the Encinia investigation. When DPS officials asked Coleman's staff if they wanted the exhibits related to the case, which included the video from Bland's phone, a Coleman aide replied: "Just the report. Thank you."
DPS also included in their news release an October 2015 certified letter in which the lawyers transmitted the contents of Bland's cellphone to her family's attorney. The letter, however, did not contain an index and does not specify that the data includes video shot by Bland.
In his letter, McCraw pushed back against recent media reports on Bland's video, saying that characterizing the video as newly discovered evidence is "categorically false."
"We want to reiterate that the civil litigation involving Sandra Bland's family was litigated carefully and appropriately under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure," McCraw writes. "At all times, the department complied with its discovery obligations in the civil litigation."
Coleman told The Dallas Morning News he did not request all the information from the Bland case in an effort to deal with the department in good faith. In response, DPS should have been more forthcoming and should not have waited on a records request to produce the video and other information. Other state agencies, he said, have often flagged for him information that is helpful to his investigations.
"Why didn't you volunteer any of this?" Coleman said. "This ain’t Washington. Should a legislator have to ask for everything not even knowing what we should ask for?"
He said his request for traffic stops was irrelevant to Friday's hearing because it was used to develop the Sandra Bland Act's data requirements and should have no bearing on whether DPS cooperated with him on other requests.
"They're trying to confuse the issue," he said. "This is why they're being treated like hostile witnesses. Because this is their pattern."
