Mendocino County, California — The Jail, the Sheriff, the Judges

The Detention Center

Mendocino County Jail

Operated byMendocino County Sheriff's Office — Corrections Division
County publishes a jail nameYes — Mendocino County Jail
Jail address951 Low Gap Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
Housing units named in death noticesMain Jail holding cell, sobering cell, C-Module housing unit
What was triedhttps://mendocinosheriff.org/corrections/ and https://mendocinosheriff.org/publications/ — no bed count, daily population, PREA audit, inspection report or contract published
Rated capacity295 beds

Source: Mendocino County Sheriff's Office — Corrections · checked 2026-08-23

Transparency rating

5/10Partial

✓The jail is named
✓Who is in custody
✗Beds and daily population — not published
✓What it costs taxpayers
✓Deaths in custody
✗PREA audits — not published
✗Independent inspection — not published
✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
✓How to post bond
✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published

This rates disclosure, not conduct — what Mendocino County publishes about a jail its taxpayers own, checked 2026-08-23. Nothing here says the jail is run well or badly. Every mark moves the moment the county posts the document.

The Building

You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.

Year builtNot found
Original costNot found
Paid for byNot found
Beds295 BSCC rated capacity (Mendocino Adult Detention Facility, Type II)

Since then

Not found. BSCC hosts a redacted 'County of Mendocino Jail Needs Assessment' at http://www.bscc.ca.gov/county-of-mendocino-jail-needs-assessment863-redacted/ , which is a needs assessment rather than an inspection or a completed expansion.

The Sheriff

Sheriff Matt Kendall

Title as publishedMendocino County Sheriff; the county budget names the office 'Office Of The Sheriff-Coroner'
Also serves asCounty Coroner — the Sheriff's Office operates a Coroner's Division (https://mendocinosheriff.org/coroners-division/)
Office address951 Low Gap Road, Ukiah, CA 95482

Still needed

Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail

Source: Mendocino County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-08-23

The Judges

The court describes itself as eight judges and one commissioner. The judicial assignments page gives courtroom assignments by case type but does not identify an arraignment or bail department.

Superior Court of California, County of Mendocino — Presiding Judge (2026)

Carly Dolan

Superior Court of California, County of Mendocino — Assistant Presiding Judge

Victoria Shanahan

Superior Court of California, County of Mendocino — Judges and Commissioner

Keith Faulder
Victoria Shanahan
FredRicco McCurry
Ann Moorman
Patrick Pekin
Carly Dolan
Charlotte Scott
Commissioner Jona Saxby

Still needed

The county's bond schedule
Share of the jail population held pretrial
Median time from booking to first appearance

Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-23

The County Commissioners

They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.

What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →

Notes on the record

Bond info: the Corrections page states 'Bail may be posted by paying the entire amount in cash, by using a certified check, money order, or post a bail bond' and links the current bail schedules — felony https://mendocinosheriff.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-Felony-Bail-Schedule-080626.pdf and misdemeanor https://mendocinosheriff.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-Misdemeanor-Bail-Schedule-080626-final.pdf.
PREA: the linked document https://mendocinosheriff.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/PREA.pdf is the Corrections Division Policy and Procedure Manual PREA policy. It notes the facility 'shall be audited by an outside auditor... once every three years' but contains no auditor, date, findings or result, so no audit result is published.
Fees: video visitation runs through Gettingout.com and commissary deposits through mycarepack.com or a lobby kiosk, but no phone, video or commissary rate is published.
The Sheriff also maintains a Citizen Connect transparency portal at https://mendocinocountyca-sheriff-transparency.connect.socrata.com/ and AB 481 and SB 978 pages, but publishes no jail capacity, budget, inspection or contract material.
Five-member Board of Supervisors, elected by district.

What California law requires

Mendocino County posts a death-in-custody page.

Posts 7 of 7

The page is here. The page is titled by statute — 'In-Custody Death Reporting PC 10008' — and is linked from the sheriff's front page and Publications page. It lists five deaths, each named and case-numbered, with all seven statutory elements: Ronald Vincent Pedigo, 2/7/2023, Mendocino County Jail sobering cell, white male 64, prebooking, accidental drug overdose; Artemio Ortega Reyes, 3/1/2024, C-Module housing unit / pronounced at local hospital, Hispanic male 40, incarcerated serving a jail sentence, accidental drug overdose; Issa Niambele, 10/30/2024, Main Jail holding cell / pronounced at local hospital, Black male 40, prebooking, internal trauma from acute drug toxicity; Emil Redzic, 2/26/2025, Adventist Health Ukiah Valley emergency room, white male 29, process of arrest, acute combined drug toxicity; Nicholas Bakewell, 6/5/2025, roadway scene in Willits, white male 36, process of arrest, restraint-associated asphyxiation with type 2 myocardial ischemic injury and acute combined drug toxicity. This list matches the five Mendocino County Sheriff's Department entries in the California DOJ Death in Custody file for 2023-2025 exactly.

✓The agency with custodial responsibility
✓The county where the death occurred
✓The facility — and where inside it
✓Race, gender and age
✓The date of death
✓Custodial status — awaiting arraignment, awaiting trial, or incarcerated
✓Manner and means of death

California Penal Code § 10008, enacted by AB 2761 and in force since January 2023, requires the agency with custodial responsibility to post these seven items on its own website within ten days of a death in custody, and to update them within thirty days if the facts change. California is the only state in the country with this duty. Checked 2026-08-23. This records what is published, nothing more.

The record

6 people have died in the Mendocino County jail since 2016.

0 by suicide

2 illness or medical

6 deaths in all, 2016 onward

Deaths where the person had not been convicted of the charge holding them5 of 6

Most recent death on the state's record2024-10-30

Deaths: Texas Justice Initiative, the cleaned copy of the Texas Attorney General’s custodial death reports — the state’s own public index carries no cause of death and has not been refreshed since August 2025. Population: Texas Commission on Jail Standards monthly report. Counted, not estimated.

These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Mendocino County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).

How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?

Your VOTE is POWERFUL.

The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.

The sheriff is on your ballot

The county elections office runs the polling place in Mendocino County and prints the ballot the sheriff’s name is on. Links from the California Secretary of State and vote.gov.

Names verified 2026-08-23 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered