Sheriff Lee Baca to create task force to address wrongful jailings



“It’s a horrible reality of what is basically the imperfect nature of the criminal justice system,” Baca said in an interview. “No one who is an innocent person should ever be tied in with the criminal justice system....There’s a difference between saying ‘I plead not guilty.’ It’s another thing to say to anybody ‘I’m not that person.’”


The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. Many of those mistakenly held inside the county’s lockups had the same names as suspects or had their identities stolen.


L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called the jailings “a travesty of justice” and another blow to the sheriff’s jails, which are under federal investigation over allegations of inmate abuse and other deputy misconduct.

This “further erodes confidence in the County jail system — just as we are struggling to restore public confidence,” he said in a statement. “It’s not enough to say that accidents happen.”



“I’m looking at how do we really get to a place where the system works as smoothly as possible,” Baca said. “The original arresting agency has to, up front, do a better job in vetting the person.... This is going to require a lot of analysis and review.... We can’t say that we can’t do better, we can always do better, but I’m dependent on other police agencies to also do better.”

Victims of mistaken identification typically go through several rounds of checks before they land in L.A. County Jail. Arresting officers use the name, birth date and driver’s license number of the person they stop to check for warrants. The first fingerprint check is usually done when officers bring the people they arrest to the police station where they are booked. From there, inmates are taken either to court or directly to County Jail.


The errors occur in jails up and down the state, and many of the misidentified inmates in the L.A. County sheriff’s jails were arrested by law enforcement agencies outside the county.


When those fingerprint numbers are included, police agencies sometimes fail to determine why the arrested person has a different number or no number at all. In those cases, authorities could catch the error by obtaining the wanted suspect’s fingerprints from the state Department of Justice and comparing them with those of the person in custody.




