The case is called “The People vs. Tony Sanchez.”
We are the people, and Denver keeps screwing up in our names.
Antonio Carlos Sanchez is a north Denver kid with a rough past and a rap sheet. That doesn’t explain why the city — still failing to correct problems with mistaken identity — held him for more than four months on a warrant for a different man.
His is the latest case in which Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration has snatched the wrong suspects and refused to recognize their identities.
“Nobody cared who I really was. It’s like I didn’t exist to the real world,” says Sanchez, 21.
His story began in March when Denver police arrested him on three warrants — one for violating his own probation in Arapahoe County and two for a man named Tony Sanchez, charged with theft in Denver.
Differences between the men are obvious. Antonio has tattoos that don’t match Tony’s description. They have different birth dates and ID numbers in police computers.
Sanchez pointed out those discrepancies while being booked into jail. In written grievances, he begged the city to compare mug shots and fingerprints.
Still, by his count, he waited 39 days in Denver’s echo chambers without so much as a court date. State law guarantees the right to appear before a judge “without unnecessary delay.”
When it finally occurred to officers that they were holding the wrong guy, they transferred Sanchez back to Arapahoe to serve time on his own case.
Soon after his release, Denver police arrested him again — correctly on a new probation violation, yet incorrectly on Tony Sanchez’s warrants. Authorities had failed to update and correct errors in paperwork, forcing Sanchez to spend about 100 more days behind bars, still mistaken for the other man.
Sanchez was shuttled several more times between Denver and Arapahoe County jails, and judges cleared him two times as the wrong guy. Still, their court orders went ignored, as did mistakes in his records.
It took Sanchez’s letter to this newspaper to prompt the ACLU to take an interest in his case and call for his release Wednesday.
Denver transferred him to Arapahoe on Thursday to serve out his own 18-month theft sentence in a halfway house and hopefully move on with his life. It’s unlikely he’ll earn time served for the 137 days he says he spent paying for the city’s incompetence.
As if Sanchez’s troubles weren’t bad enough, the timing of the case is even worse.
The city pledged to mend its ways in 2007 after settling a lawsuit for jailing an Aurora woman whose identity it had mistaken. Six others since have come forward about their own ordeals with the city, including a black woman held on a white woman’s warrant.
Denver announced policies to solve the problem last summer. And after the ACLU sued on behalf of the victims, Safety Manager Al LaCabe pledged that officers would “work very hard to avoid” identity mistakes and at least “learn from them.”
That didn’t help Sanchez.
LaCabe now is seeking a White House appointment as a federal marshal. This begs the question of how a man confounded by the identities of his own inmates might fare searching for federal fugitives.
Hickenlooper broke his silence on the problem Friday, saying, “What happened to Mr. Sanchez should not happen to anyone. We sincerely regret the distress this situation has caused him.
“We are committed to preventing this type of situation from happening again,” he added.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
