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.
The problems continue because of a breakdown not just by jail officials but by police who arrest the wrong people and by the courts, which have issued warrants that did not precisely identify the right people.
Sheriff's officials said they make every effort to avoid detaining the wrong suspects. They pointed out that the number of people wrongly identified as wanted criminals makes up a tiny fraction of the 15,000 inmates in the county's jails at any given time. The Sheriff's Department produced the tally of people who were jailed because of misidentification in response to a Times Public Records Act request.
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.
In California, criminals are assigned a unique nine-digit number matched to their fingerprints. Some warrants issued by judges fail to include those identifiers, making it more difficult for police and jailers to determine whether they have the right suspect.
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 criminal's fingerprints from the state Department of Justice and comparing them with those of the person in custody.
"It's bureaucratic sloth and indifference," said attorney Donald W. Cook, who has represented more than a dozen clients mistakenly held on warrants issued for other people. "They don't want to take the heat for letting someone go who a cop has decided, no matter how tentatively, is the subject of a warrant."
Those mistakenly arrested told The Times that they were ignored when they pleaded with police and jail staff about their innocence. In the county jails, the Sheriff's Department has a policy to launch investigations when inmates protest during booking that they are not the wanted people. But records show the department conducted investigations for only a small fraction of the number of people who courts eventually ruled were not the right suspects.
Sheriff's officials said they are bombarded with false innocence claims from inmates. It would be impossible to check every claim, they said, and jailers' authority to release an inmate ordered detained by a judge is limited.
"People lie to us about who they are all the time," said sheriff's Cmdr. David Fender.
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.
Once inmates arrive at the jail, officials there review the fingerprints again and compare what's on a warrant to the personal information for the inmate. But sheriff's officials maintain that their top priority is to hold people awaiting court hearings rather than questioning the validity of the arrests.
"It's not our position or authority to check the work of every police agency in the county," said sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker.
The number of mistaken identifications has been declining, but the department is still on pace to record nearly 200 wrongful detentions this year. For those who are jailed, the experience can be harrowing.
Ventura, the former construction worker, was pulled over on a traffic stop by Chino police and arrested on a warrant meant for someone else. Jailers stripped him and escorted him to a large shower area when he arrived at the L.A. County Jail.
Another inmate, he said, pushed him over so he could use Ventura's shower, leaving Ventura naked on the ground with back pain. Later, another inmate snatched his pair of jail-issued shoes and forced Ventura to apologize.
"Psychologically, I was already dead," he said.
Two days later, Ventura, a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, arrived in court. He preached to other inmates in his holding cell as they waited for their hearings.
Once in court, Ventura, a native of El Salvador, watched as his lawyer told a judge that police had arrested the wrong man. The 1994 warrant was for a Mexican national accused of drug possession at a time when Ventura's passport showed he wasn't even in the country, the attorney said. A Los Angeles Police Department [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/police/los-angeles-police-department-ORGOV000939.topic ] official brought the actual suspect's fingerprints to court and concluded that Ventura was the wrong person.
"Mr. Ventura, our apologies," a judge told him as he ordered Ventura released. "Good luck."
Once released, those arrested have little recourse. State and federal laws generally protect law enforcement agencies from lawsuits over such detentions as long as officers were acting on a valid warrant and had a reasonable belief that they were arresting the right person.
Sheriff's deputies pulled over Phillip Reed, a South L.A. youth sports coach, who was on his way home from the grocery store in 2009.
A warrant listed Reed's name, date of birth and driver's license number, but Reed knew he was the wrong man. His younger brother, Marcus, had used Phillip's identity in the past, Reed said in a deposition. Reed had previously obtained a court document showing that another warrant had wrongly named him before.
He said he presented the document to the deputies who pulled him over — a claim that one of the arresting deputies later disputed. Authorities booked Reed even though the person listed on the warrant had a unique fingerprint number and Reed had no number.
That night, inside a county holding cell, Reed said he begged deputies to look inside his wallet, where he kept the judge's form.
In the corner of his cell, Reed recalled in an interview, he began to weep and pray: "I know this is not me. I don't know what else to do. God help me."
It wasn't until the next day that authorities discovered the error and released Reed.
In some cases, warrants contain only names, dates of birth and basic physical descriptions that can apply to multiple people. Many times, officers will encounter people who match most if not all of those details.
In 1989, Santiago Ibarra Rivera spent a week in jail before officials figured out that he was not the man wanted on a warrant for a deadly drunk driving accident. Rivera had no criminal record but shared a similar name and the same birthday as the man for which the warrant was meant.
When he was freed, authorities gave Rivera a court document showing that he had been exonerated. Years later, he lost the record when his wallet was stolen.
The warrant became a distant memory until March 2009, when San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies stopped Rivera while he was riding in a co-worker's car that was missing a front license plate. Deputies ran his name and the warrant appeared.
Rivera pleaded that he wasn't the wanted man and that he'd been wrongly jailed for the warrant once before. He told one of the deputies that he had other court papers at his home to prove it. But the deputies, he said, refused to stop there. According to one of the arresting deputies, Rivera's knowledge of the warrant only served to make him appear guilty.
Rivera said he complained first in San Bernardino County Jail and later in L.A. County Jail, where he was transferred, but was ignored in both lockups.
A review of Rivera's criminal history based on his fingerprints, readily available in law enforcement databases, would have showed that in 1989 he had been arrested and exonerated on a vehicular manslaughter case.
The old court file that contained the real suspect's fingerprints was in the court archives. Rivera languished behind bars as officials searched for them. He implored officials to find his records "as soon as possible because I have to return to my work."
When it was eventually confirmed that Rivera was the wrong person, Superior Court Judge Kathryn Solorzano apologized. "Mr. Rivera, I'm very sorry. I don't know how many days…"
"I think close to a month," Rivera's attorney interrupted, according to a transcript.
GOP Fears Iowa Caucus May be Hacked Following Purported Video Threat by 'Anonymous' Last minute 'security by obscurity' defense unlikely to ensure integrity of results...
Well, whaddaya know? Suddenly, after all these years of warnings from The BRAD BLOG that electronic voting systems are exceedingly vulnerable to manipulation by insider election officials as well as outside hackers from almost anywhere, such as China or Iran or even al Qaeda, the GOP is now worried about electronic vote hacking in their Iowa Caucuses on January 3rd.
"Their fear," as AP reports today, is triggered by little more than a two-minute video posted on the Internet in early November, purportedly created by the "hacktivist" collective known as Anonymous, calling on members, in a trademark computer-generated voice, to "peacefully shut down the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses." [The complete video is posted at the end of this article.]
Progressive radio and television host Thom Hartmann covered the AP story on his radio show this morning, suggesting that while the GOP may have concerns about Anonymous shutting down or manipulating the results of the Iowa caucuses, they may also attempt to use the opportunity of heightened security to ensure that Republican candidate Ron Paul is not named the winner. A poll released last night by Public Policy Polling (PPP) shows Paul vaulting into the lead in Iowa, as previous front-runner Newt Gingrich's numbers have collapsed in the Hawkeye State. Paul now leads over Romney in Iowa, according to PPP's poll, with 23%, followed by Romney at 20% and Gingrich at 14%.
[NOTE: I will be appearing on Hartmann's TV program, The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, this evening to discuss this story. --- UPDATE: My appearance with Hartmann is now posted here.]
According to AP's report, the GOP is now concerned about "an Iowa caucus marred by hackers who corrupt the database used to gather votes and crash the website used to inform the public about results that can shape the campaign for the White House."
They go on to report that "Experts in computer security said such concerns are valid."
Unfortunately, however, it appears as though the steps the GOP are planning to take to try and counter the threat will do little ensure the public can trust the results that the party eventually reports to the public. (In the Iowa Caucuses, party officials, rather than state election officials, tally and report results to the media and public.)
If Republicans in Iowa, or anywhere else for that matter, truly fear the manipulation of results, there is only one way to help make such manipulation as difficult as possible. Similarly, if supporters of Ron Paul are concerned about same --- and they have every good reason to be, particularly considering the well-documented history of vote manipulation by supporters of Mitt Romney in the past --- they ought to be calling for the very same solution to help ensure the integrity of results in Iowa (and, frankly, everywhere else) in 2012...
AP's story quotes long-time University of Iowa computer science professor and e-voting expert Dr. Douglas Jones, whom we have quoted many times ourselves over the years here at The BRAD BLOG, as he has long been warning about the threat of e-vote manipulation. He confirms, once again, to AP that such a threat is indeed quite real.
"It's very clear the data consolidation and data gathering from the caucuses, which determines the headlines the next morning, who might withdraw or resign from the process, all of that is fragile," Jones told AP.
Wes Eno, a member of the Iowa GOP's central committee and political director for candidate Michele Bachmann's state campaign, says, "With the eyes of the media on the state, the last thing we want to do is have a situation where there is trouble with the reporting system...We don't want that to be the story."
In response to the concerns, the party is said to have "authorized additional security measures aimed at ensuring hackers are unable to delay the release of caucus results."
What those "additional security measures" are, however, is not detailed. The Iowa GOP official in charge of coordinating caucuses, Ryan Gough, "declined to comment on specifics of the new security efforts so as not to give away 'the game plan' to hackers," says AP.
Good luck with that whole "security by obscurity" thing, fellas. There is really only one way --- and it needn't be a secret --- to help assure that results cannot easily be manipulated by either Anonymous or by GOP officials themselves.
While most GOP Caucuses in Iowa employ secret ballots, as cast on paper, some, in the past, have used a show of hands. The results in both cases are then sent to state GOP headquarters, by phone or by computer, where they are then tallied by a computer database and finally announced to the media.
The GOP is calling on all caucuses to use paper ballots this year so that "the ballots would provide a backup in the event of any later confusion about the results." But those paper ballots only go so far towards ensuring integrity, the central tabulating database is the real vulnerability in the system.
In order to ensure those paper votes are tabulated correctly across the state, and not manipulated by anyone, they must be counted publicly at the caucus locations, with results announced and posted at the time to caucus goers and the public at large at all 1,800 caucus locations, before those results are then sent to the central tabulation center.
The hand-counted paper ballot system, with decentralized results posted at the "precincts," is the only way to try and protect against manipulation of the results --- from either insiders or outsiders --- in a way that the public can know the results have not been manipulated.
For the more technically minded, Jones explains in the AP article how Anonymous --- or anybody else --- could target the results in Iowa --- or anywhere else... Jones said officials are likely working to prevent two of Anonymous' favorite tools. The first sends thousands of requests to a website server, rendering the site inaccessible. The second is known as a "SQL injection" and could be used to change the content of a computer database, including one used to record vote totals.
When elections officials in Washington, D.C., tested an online voting system last year, University of Michigan researchers were able to use an SQL injection to quickly invade the system and make it play the Wolverine fight song every time someone voted, he said.
"These SQL vulnerabilities are notorious, widely known and yet it's a mistake people keep making," Jones said. "It is one of the first things that you try these days."
The BRAD BLOG reported extensively in 2010 on the complete takeover of the D.C. election cited above, by "white hat hackers" from the University of Michigan, and how, once they were inside the election system and changing all of the recorded votes, they also noticed that computers from both Iran and China were inside the system as well.
As to concerns about manipulation by more "friendly" forces, supporters of Ron Paul, no doubt, recall the Tampa Straw Poll in 2010 where supporters of Mitt Romney were videotaped voting again and again and again, "stuffing" the 100% unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting systems used there. When some complained about the vote manipulation, they reportedly received threats from the local Republican Party's organizer of the straw poll.
And yet, despite all of the well-founded fears, so far only the GOP in Iowa has, at least partially, woken up to the concerns.
AP's story reports that officials in the upcoming primary states of New Hampshire (where they use paper ballots, but tabulate the majority of them only by Diebold computers serviced and programmed by a company with a criminal background) and in South Carolina (where they use the same 100% unverifiable ES&S touch-screen systems that inexplicably "elected" the completely unknown and largely illiterate Alvin Greene as the state's 2010 Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate) have absolutely no worries... Among the early voting states, the hacking concerns have most spooked officials in Iowa. In New Hampshire, whose primary is one week after the Iowa caucuses, officials rely on a mostly manual process that uses paper and is less vulnerable to an attack on computer systems, said Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens. In South Carolina, which follows 11 days later, State Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said he was not aware of any concerns.
Oh, and there's one other concern that the GOP doesn't seem to have in Iowa. To our knowledge (and we'd love to be told otherwise), there is no requirement for state-issued Photo IDs at the Iowa Caucus sites. That, despite years of Republican claims that "voter fraud" is prevalent at the polling place (it isn't, as dozens of studies have shown.) The lack of Photo ID requirement by the state GOP at caucuses is likely because they know quite well that the result would be a lot of their own elderly voters, who no longer have a drivers license, would be disenfranchised at the caucuses on January 3.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
