Denver officials made it harder to investigate mistaken-identity jailings when they granted immunity to a deputy involved in civil litigation, independent monitor Richard Rosenthal said in a report this week.
Rosenthal said the city attorney’s office persuaded the jail’s management to give the deputy immunity, scuttling an internal affairs investigation into an alleged improper-detention case.
Rosenthal, who monitors investigations into claims of wrongdoing at the sheriff and police departments, said the internal affairs investigation should have been allowed to proceed, and he should have been given a chance to review the outcome and weigh in on behalf of the public.
“We feel wrongful-detention cases are significant and important and need to be monitored, and there’s a strong public interest in how they are resolved,” Rosenthal said. “The decision to resolve the case without giving the monitor an opportunity to be involved or heard was a great surprise and an unfortunate act.”
The controversy has surfaced at a time when the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is representing seven people who say Denver authorities wrongly jailed them. And the number of those suing the city could grow. The ACLU said it has uncovered dozens of other cases where people were jailed on mistaken identities.
The federal lawsuit, filed in August, states the city “failed, through deliberate indifference, to adopt and implement procedures, policies, supervision and training that would have eliminated or minimized the risk of such mistaken identity arrests.”
Rosenthal said the city’s actions in one of those cases was poor public policy. He criticized the decision to give immunity to a deputy involved in the imprisonment of De De Davis, who said she was jailed June 15, 2007, on another woman’s warrant while walking home from picking up milk at a gas station.
Her lawsuit said she was about 100 feet from her home when Denver police surrounded her, her four children and her nephew. According to the lawsuit, the officers said they were investigating a report that her 18-year-old son had a firearm, when Davis says there was no firearm.
Police said she was arrested for interfering with their efforts to arrest her son.
Davis contends in her lawsuit that she was arrested on a warrant for “Brandy Nichole Hair,” a 5-foot-2-inch, 25-year-old white woman. Davis is 5 inches taller, 13 years older and black.
Despite pleas that she was the wrong woman, Davis was not released from custody until three days after her arrest, according to the lawsuit. She said in her lawsuit that authorities released her after she used rent money to post bond on the warrant for Hair.
Davis pleaded guilty to a municipal charge of interference.
The city attorney’s office offered to settle her lawsuit for $20,000 in January. Davis and her lawyers filed court documents Feb. 24 accepting the settlement. A day later, the city attorney’s office moved to rescind the settlement.
In attempting to rescind its offer, the city contended that Davis was correctly arrested on an interference charge. The city attorney concedes she was detained on an incorrect warrant but argues that it added two hours, at most, to her incarceration time — “far from the extra days claimed” in her lawsuit.
Luis Corchado, assistant director of litigation in the city attorney’s office, said he could not comment because the case was active. Corrections Director Bill Lovingier said he decided the city attorney’s interests in the case were sufficient to abort the internal affairs investigation.
“It was highly unlikely that there was anything other than a procedural faux pas, and that it was unlikely the deputy did anything that would have resulted in significant discipline,” Lovingier said.
Mark Silverstein, the ACLU of Colorado’s legal director, said he is filing a response to the effort to void the settlement today.
“We’re going to be saying their motion is a baseless and a brazen attempt to transform their reckless failures into relief from a settlement that they offered,” Silverstein said.
“We’re hoping this case can be a catalyst to change the practices from now into the future so these kinds of things won’t happen again, or if they happen, they will be discovered quickly and remedied quickly,” Silverstein said.
Rosenthal said the decision to halt the internal affairs investigation into the Davis case will make it harder to address allegations about the city’s incarceration practices.
He said an investigation could easily have gone forward even though the deputy involved had divulged information to the city attorney’s office. The city attorney could have made the information it solicited from the deputy off-limits under attorney-client privilege, Rosenthal said, and internal affairs investigators still could have conducted a separate probe.
If deputies continue to receive a blanket of immunity, there will be no way to discipline them or air out alleged wrongdoing, Rosenthal said.
“In the three and a half years we’ve been doing monitoring, this is the first and only time this has happened,” he said.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
