About
Cayley
Cayley Mandadi was raped and beaten to death on October 29, 2017. She was caring, compassionate, and smart — she won every science fair she entered, was invited to Nationals in eighth grade, and as a child found a mammoth tooth for a school project and was interviewed on television about it. The person she was is the reason this work exists; the way the system treated her family afterward is the reason it takes the shape it does.
What the system taught her family
Cayley's father, Lawrence Baitland, and her mother, Alison Steele, became — in Lawrence's phrase — involuntary participants in the criminal justice system. They waited more than six months for her autopsy report and had it for thirteen minutes before it became public. They learned of developments in the case from the media. They first confronted the most graphic evidence at trial, in the courtroom, because no law let a prosecutor prepare them privately. Two trials followed: the first ended in a hung jury; in the second, her killer was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to twenty years, the maximum.
Several of the nine bills on this site come directly from those experiences. All of them come from the same conviction: the failures were in the law, and the law can be changed.
A record of getting it done
Lawrence and Alison have done this before, working with the Legislature as advocates:
- The C.L.E.A.R. Alert — Texas's alert for missing adults who fall between AMBER and Silver. Cayley was fourteen months too old for an AMBER Alert; the alert DPS built honours her and others in its name: Cayley, D'Lisa, Erin, Ashanti, and the Rest.
- The bill naming the C.L.E.A.R. Alert for the people it commemorates.
- Evidence access for the Santa Fe families — the 2023 law (SB 435) letting prosecutors show a medical examiner's report and video evidence to a victim's family without making it public. It passed the Senate 31–0 and the House 135–0. The evidence-sharing bill on this site extends it.
That record is the credential behind this package: nine bills, drafted, analysed, and ready for the organisations and legislators who will champion and author them.