CALIFORNIA
The year, 2015 – we have the technology to pinpoint and identify a truck full of ISIS terrorists with weapons moving down an Iraqi highway to some goat-herding village and take it out with a drone strike.
It’s amazing.
But the people who run some county jails can’t fix an arrest warrant system that relies on duct tape and chicken-wire solutions. The broken system routinely misidentifies and arrests innocent people and some end up spending days in jail before the errors are rectified, and they are released.
In 2011, I wrote about this misidentification problem at the jail in Ventura County. It’s still happening in one of the nation’s largest jail systems – the Los Angeles County jail – and, perhaps other jails across the state.
Take the case of Reggie Smith.
In 2012 in Los Angeles, Smith sued the county after he was arrested multiple times on an outstanding warrant for man facing rape charges.
Smith’s attorney Donald Cook maintains that identification errors and the county officials’ reluctance to fix them have led to thousands of wrongful arrests and incarcerations, according to a story published last week by Courthouse News Service . Cook told Courthouse News that officials knew for years that the warrant wrongly identified his client as the rape suspect. But they didn’t do anything – Nada.
Cook also represented Santiago Rivera in another case of mistaken identity. Rivera claimed he has been wrongfully arrested as a result of an ID error on a warrant in 1989 and 2009. The second time, Rivera said, he spent a month in jail before officials realized their mistake.
Nine Days, Lost Job, Innocent
After reading the Courthouse News story, Charles Velasquez, of Port Hueneme in Ventura County, came to mind. In 2010, he spent 9 days in the Ventura County jail, lost his job, and spent much of his time behind bars begging and pleading for some jail deputy to listen to him.
“I told at least 10 people, and nobody would listen,” Velasquez said.
He spent the Easter weekend behind bars.
I interviewed Velasquez and others who were misidentified and sent to the clink. I wrote the story for the Ventura County Star in 2011. Although it was a serious assignment, it started shaping up like the local version of “My Cousin Vinnie” with Yosemite Sam calling the shots at the county jail.
“I got all my teeth.”
Velasquez was arrested in 2010 on two warrants out of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara for Arturo Perez Gonzalez who had been impersonating him. Gonzalez was Velasquez’s ex-wife’s boyfriend. Velasquez said Gonzalez has a rose and dagger tattoo and is missing his front teeth.
“I got all my teeth,” Velasquez told me, adding that he didn’t tattoos, showing me his arms.
It didn’t matter. Velasquez made a court appearance two days after his arrest. Velasquez told the judge that they got the wrong guy, and that he wasn’t Arturo Gonzalez.
The judge told him to wait. If Los Angeles didn’t pick him up in five days, the judge said he would release him.
Velasquez never got a court-appointed attorney while he was in jail.
Medication Time and a Moment of Clarity
A moment of clarity arrived during “pill call” at the jail when Velasquez who was under 23-hour lockdown because of Arturo Gonzalez’s criminal record. Velasquez said there was no way he was going to take Gonzalez’s anti-psychotic medication.
After endless pleading, Velasquez convinced the jail doctor and nurse that he wasn’t Gonzalez. They remembered Gonzalez and agreed. But they didn’t tell the jail supervisors. So Velasquez stayed put but didn’t have to take Gonzalez’s pills.
For the 2011 article, I interviewed Attorney Jeffery Held, whose law firm represented the county. He said Velazquez could have sent a “kite” or message on a piece of paper passed on to jail managers stating that he was wrongfully arrested.
Velasquez countered: “I gave two kites to deputies during the first few days I was there.” Nothing happened.
L.A. Detectives Come to Pick Up Velasquez
Two Los Angeles detectives finally went to the Ventura County jail and picked up Velasquez. Again, Velasquez kept insisting that he wasn’t Gonzalez.
“We’ll get it all squared away when we get there,” Velasquez said the detective told him.
The detectives got to Van Nuys, compared Gonzalez’s booking photo with Velasquez’s and moments later; they figured it out.
They got the wrong guy. Velasquez was indeed himself and not Gonzalez.
They apologized and gave him a ride back to Ventura County. But first, the Los Angeles detectives gave Velasquez his and Gonzalez’s fingerprint identification numbers that are assigned when a person is booked into jail.
The detectives said this was to prevent the same thing from happening again.
Lost Time and Job and a Lawsuit
But Velasquez not only lost his freedom for nine days. He lost his job where he had been working during the height of the strawberry-picking season.
Upset, Velasquez hired Attorney Brian Vogel who filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Velasquez and 10 other people who were misidentified and wrongfully arrested in Ventura County.
Vogel alleged that his clients’ constitutional rights were violated.
Then Assistant Sheriff Gary Pentis accused Vogel of “posturing” on behalf of his client. But Pentis admitted that a deputy screwed up by not comparing Gonzalez’s booking photograph with Velasquez’s appearance.
But Pentis said mistakes like this happen, and “we need to do everything to stop it.”
“Mistakes” Happen and the “Mistake” Fix
But these “mistakes” were routinely being made at the Ventura County jail for many years.
In an interview in 2011, then Assistant Public Defender Howard Asher said wrongly identified people had been jailed in Ventura County for decades.
“It’s been a problem for years, ever since I’ve been practicing,” Asher had said.
He worked in the Public Defender’s Office for 30 years, he noted.
Last week, Vogel said mistakes still happen in the Ventura County jail but a very few and far between.
“I have to give them credit. They’ve done a better job,” said Vogel.
One reason is because then newly elected Sheriff Geoff Dean, who inherited the problem of arrests screw-ups, decided to fix it as soon as possible.
Using fingerprint identification numbers, which are assigned when a person is arrested, along with tapping into an FBI identification system plus booking photos have dramatically reduced arrest warrant snafus, according to Vogel.
In a settlement reached with the plaintiffs in 2011 and months after the lawsuit was filed, the department denied wrongdoing.
The 40-page agreement, which a federal judge approved, credited the Sheriff Dean’s new policy because it exceeded the minimum standards required by the court.
Under the policy, people who say they’ve been mistakenly arrested will be allowed to fill out a complaint form, which will immediately trigger an investigation after they are booked into the jail.
Vogel said the form is signed under penalty of perjury.
He said it now takes a couple of hours to clear up these errors as opposed to days.
The Sheriff’s Department denied any wrongdoing but agreed to pay $3,000 for each incident of mistaken arrest up to a total of $120,000 in damages, according to the lawsuit. In addition, the county paid $175,000 – Vogel’s legal fees and that of his co-counsel, Heather Quest.
Other Cases of Mistaken Identity in Ventura County handled by Vogel in 2011:
- Javier Duran, who was mentally impaired, arrested in 2010 for indecent exposure in Oxnard, California. He said he wasn’t the person police were looking for, Gonzalez Solis. But Duran went to court and admitted a violation of probation. He was given credit for two days served. Duran was let out, and the next day, he was brought back to court after the error was discovered by the Public Defender’s Office. He was later found factually innocent.
- David Wiley, of Los Angeles, was arrested in Los Angeles,and while in jail, he was told he was wanted on a warrant out of Ventura County for Ronald Smith, an alias Wiley used. Wiley was jailed for eight days and never went to court. He was given a bus ticket back to Los Angeles. In 2011, Wiley served a prison term for possession of marijuana, and on the day of his release, he was hauled back to Ventura County, once again, for two warrants for Ronald Smith. A judge released him because these were minor crimes that were more than 10 years old.
- In 2008, Miguel Aguilar was arrested in Moorpark, California, on an outstanding warrant for a man with a similar name and date-of-birth. Aguilar was also charged for being under the influence. Aguilar was taken to the Los Angeles County jail in Compton for a crime the other Miguel Aguilar committed. The judge there ruled that law enforcement got the wrong person and ordered him released. But U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had an immigration hold on Miguel Aguilar, who has legal residency status, according to Vogel.
Vogel said a person who has a common name like John Smith or Jose Gonzalez stands a better chance of being misidentified by police and jail deputies.
Los Angeles County Alleged “Deaf Ears”
Meanwhile, Attorney Cook noted that over a four-year period from 2006 to 2010, 1,500 people had been exonerated after the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department detained them. There were only three warrant investigations, the attorney told Judge Wilson.
“A reasonable inference one can draw here is not that only three prisoners complained; rather, it is that many if not most complained but their complaints were simply ignored,” Cook wrote in an April 21 filing to the court, adding that he had declarations from 12 people to support that contention.
Los Angeles County representative Scott Caron asked U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson to reject the claim for the same reason the appeals court had dismissed Ventura’s claim against San Bernardino County
Caron called Cook’s contentions “speculative.”
He noted that Cook did not make clear how many of the 1,500 had been remanded into the department’s custody from a court.
Taxpayers and Legal Costs
How much are county officials paying law firms hired to defend these lawsuits that, for the most part, can be prevented by putting in place policies like Ventura County to keep all these “mistakes” to a minimum?
It’s taxpayers who foot the bill for legal costs, settlements and time spent by those who work in the criminal justice to investigate these mistakes.
If this money was coming from the pockets of county administration or jail budgets, the problem would be fixed almost overnight.
What is worse is there is no way to measure the time or jobs lost by innocent people when they have to sit in jail until these mistakes are rectified.
Vogel best summed it up in 2011: “This is not rocket science, and they have the means to figure this out quickly and effectively.”
Meanwhile, the legal costs are mounting for locking up innocent people.