Kafka California
by digby
Who needs due process? After all, the authorities always *know* who’s guilty and who isn’t, right?
Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before authorities realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Times investigation has found.
The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including officials’ overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.
The errors are so common that in some years people were jailed because of mistaken identity an average of once a day.
Many of those wrongly held inside the county’s lockups had the same names as criminals or had their identities stolen — problems that took days or weeks for authorities to sort out.
In one case, a mechanic held for nine days in 1989 on a warrant meant for someone else was detained again 20 years later on the same warrant. He was jailed for more than a month the second time before the error was discovered.
In another instance, a Nissan customer service supervisor was hauled by authorities from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name.
In a third case, a former construction worker mistaken for a wanted drug offender said he was assaulted by inmates and ignored by jailers.
“I’m with criminals, and I was a criminal to them,” said Jose Ventura, 53, who had never been arrested before.
There are many, many reasons that a person can be wrongfully incarcerated. When you whittle away at the Fourth Amendment, take away the protections that give people the chance to challenge the government, you get more and more of this sort of thing, with less and less capability of sorting it out. Mistakes do happen — the government is not infallible. Any system that requires simply taking them at their word is pretty much a guarantee that innocent people will be left to molder in jail. If you think it can’t happen to you, think again.
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