DENVER—A lawsuit accuses Denver of wrongly jailing more than 500 people over seven years because officials didn’t ensure that they had arrested the right person.
The Denver Post reported Sunday ( ) the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city and county of Denver in federal court. The lawsuit says authorities arrested people who were the wrong race or had obvious differences in age, weight and height.
“It seems that it ought to be easy to have a procedure so that at least when someone is brought in on a warrant that the ID bureau could check to make sure the one brought in is the one that is wanted,” ACLU of Colorado legal director Mark Silverstein said.
City officials said the mistakes make up a fraction of the thousands of inmates incarcerated each year. They said they try to avoid arresting the wrong people but acknowledge mistakes have happened.
“The best we can do is set up processes so these get addressed immediately, and that’s what we’ve done,” Denver police Lt. Matt Murray said.
A task force is studying the issue, Murray said.
City officials have said they have no comprehensive system to track mistaken-identity arrests. The ACLU said it found 503 such cases from 2002 into 2009 by combing through court and jail records.
The group didn’t document cases after 2009 because that time period did not affect the people it is representing.
One judge’s note cited by the ACLU read, “(Defendant) brought in was wrong defendant….Go figure!”
Denver’s lawyers said in court filings that the problem has not reached the level of deliberate indifference needed to show constitutional violations occurred.
The city also contends it has made improvements, including a 2007 training bulletin warning police officers they should do more before making an arrest than locating a name in a computer database that is the same or similar to a suspect’s name.
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Information from: The Denver Post,
