St. Louis Dispatch reports on wrongful arrests in St. Louis.
December 3, 2013 8:15 AM Subscribe
It could happen to you. Maybe you've always trusted the police or the justice system to do the right thing, eventually. Maybe you watch too many crime shows where the fingerprint comes back immediately, or the lab can determine toxins in the blood sample of a murder victim in about 15 minutes. Or maybe you just don't think people can be this incompetent and uncaring. Robert Patrick and Jennifer S. Mann of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch report on the wrongful arrests of at least 100 people in the St. Louis area, and their attempts to find out how widespread the problem really is.
My story (by proxy): A few months after I moved to the Kansas City area, my then-fiance received a warrant in the mail. To make a very long story short, it turned out that his brother, who has a record a mile long, used his name, date of birth and Social Security number when pulled over for a routine traffic stop that ended up being an arrest for possession and various other minor infractions, the court date for which he skipped. He was fingerprinted at the time, which should have revealed the error immediately, but instead, my husband had to go to the police station to give his own prints, and eventually hire a lawyer and go to court to get the charges dropped. There were no consequences for the brother for using a false name. Since then, my husband has had to lie to his mother about changing his SSN (it isn't possible to do it, but we had to make BIL believe it was so he's stop using it) and every six months or so, check in with the police department to make sure a flag still exists on his name and SSN so that if it is given again, extra steps are taken to confirm identity. The Post-Dispatch article sounds pretty familiar; lack of competence, no procedures in place to avoid or fix errors, lack of empathy by authorities.
My story (by proxy): A few months after I moved to the Kansas City area, my then-fiance received a warrant in the mail. To make a very long story short, it turned out that his brother, who has a record a mile long, used his name, date of birth and Social Security number when pulled over for a routine traffic stop that ended up being an arrest for possession and various other minor infractions, the court date for which he skipped. He was fingerprinted at the time, which should have revealed the error immediately, but instead, my husband had to go to the police station to give his own prints, and eventually hire a lawyer and go to court to get the charges dropped. There were no consequences for the brother for using a false name. Since then, my husband has had to lie to his mother about changing his SSN (it isn't possible to do it, but we had to make BIL believe it was so he's stop using it) and every six months or so, check in with the police department to make sure a flag still exists on his name and SSN so that if it is given again, extra steps are taken to confirm identity. The Post-Dispatch article sounds pretty familiar; lack of competence, no procedures in place to avoid or fix errors, lack of empathy by authorities.
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