Grand Jury: No Indictment in Sandra Bland Case

CNN -A Texas grand jury has decided not to indict anyone relating to the death of Sandra Bland, a case that raised questions of excessive police force and the role of race after she was found dead in a jail cell last summer.

The grand jury, however, will reconvene in January to consider whether to indict people on other charges in connection with the case, Darrell Jordan, a special prosecutor handling the case, said Monday night.

Jordan also said the grand jury decided that no Waller County Jail employee would be charged. He declined to say what charges still could be considered and against whom.

"After reviewing all the evidence in the death of Sandra Bland, a Waller grand jury did not return an indictment in the death of Bland, nor were any indictments returned against any employee of the Waller County Jail," Jordan said after the grand jury met for more than eight hours Monday.

"The grand jury has looked at all the evidence and found no evidence of murder," he said.

Bland, an African-American woman, was found dead in her cell three days after being arrested for allegedly failing to use her turn signal on July 10. She was 28.

Officials in Waller County claim that Bland hanged herself with a plastic bag. Her family and others have questioned that account.

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"We are not going to allow what they have done in a limited, secret capacity to prevent us from doing what we need to do to get answers for the family," Bland family attorney Cannon Lambert told CNN affiliate KPRC-TV in Houston.

Even before Monday's decision, Bland's family in Chicago called the grand jury system in Texas flawed, saying the testimony should be open to the public.

"Right now, the biggest problem for me is the entire process," Bland's mother, Geneva Read-Veal, said. "I simply can't have faith in a system that's not inclusive of my family that's supposed to have the investigation."

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders also weighed in.

"There's no doubt in my mind that she, like too many African-Americans who die in police custody, would be alive today if she were a white woman," he said. "We need to reform a very broken criminal justice system."