| UNFAIR PARK | Attorney Dean Malone fights for the rights of prisoners and their families. Nathan Hunsinger Dallas Attorney Dean Malone wants to hold Texas prisons and county jails accountable. JAILHOUSE ROCKER BY KATE PEZZULLI C 44 hris Cabler worked hard, loved ani- mals and had a big heart that led him to help his family whenever he could. He had two grown children he loved dearly and a grandson who was 6 days old when he died. On May 5, 2019, Cabler hanged himself in a jail in Red River County after being arrested for a fail- ure to appear for a ticket for driving without insurance. The officers knew from the time they booked him that he had some mental health issues, needed medication and had tried to commit suicide before. It had all been docu- mented. But they didn’t give him the medi- cine or the attention he needed. It took Cabler nine hours and three minutes to set up the contraption that would end his life. His suicide note read, “I couldn’t be alone anymore […] I’m tired of them telling me to do it that’s all they ever say do it do it do it so fuck it I’ll do it! All I wanted was to be able to talk to some- body!!” Cabler’s mother, Kathy Cabler, says she tried to tell the guards that something bad was going to happen, but they didn’t listen. “They wouldn’t talk to me, nobody would, as hard as I tried, and I wore myself out that last week, at least the last two weeks before he passed,” his mother said. “Something has to happen, it just does. I mean, this is ridiculous when a parent is telling you something … my child, please, and they’re not even going to give you a phone call back.” Dean Malone, the attorney who later sued Cabler’s jailers, isn’t all that interested in talking about his own upbringing. He’s more concerned with the present and the future, as well as his clients’ hardships. Still, he’ll say this of his childhood: He didn’t grow up thinking he’d become a lawyer; he just always knew he wanted to help people. Malone represented Cabler’s family and many others like it over the years, but his path to becoming one of North Texas’ lead- ing lawyers trying to hold prisons, jails and sheriffs in the region accountable didn’t start until after he worked in an entirely dif- ferent field and had a family. Nowadays, he focuses on civil rights, especially for those not-so-few people who have endured seri- ous injuries or died while in lockup. The way he sees it, his work is to protect the con- stitutional rights of those who wind up in- carcerated in Texas. In other words, he stays pretty busy. Before he decided to go to law school around 25 years ago, Malone worked as an engineer. Then he decided to switch careers, and he put his all into making that happen. He already had a wife and three small chil- dren and was living in the Dallas area. But he made the 224-mile roundtrip trek to law school at Baylor University in Waco in a ve- hicle with an air conditioning system that eventually went out. He didn’t have the cash to fix it, but still he “drove roughly the next 26-plus months … back and forth to law school every day,” he recalled. “I’m probably [the] only Baylor law school graduate that can say when I gradu- ated law school, I had never a spent a night in McLennan County,” where Waco is lo- cated, he said. Since then, he’s defended clients in cases involving constitutional rights, free speech and jail suicides, among other causes. FAKE ID, REAL CONSEQUENCES A ll these years later, a 2017 case still drives home for Malone why he took up this line of work. “Somebody called me several years ago, a young man was ar- rested for nothing more than a fake >> p6 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 SEPTEMBER 1–7, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
