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Identity mix-ups at Dallas jail can take a week to sort out, or decades

At the Dallas County Jail, inmates who're arrested due to an identity mix-up, even in serious cases, have trouble getting the system to document and rectify the error. Kevin Krause at the Dallas News on Wednesday published the story of two jail inmates recently held for a week or so apiece when the system really meant to arrest somebody else. Bureaucratic delays  kept fingerprints from revealing the mix-up, and naturally nobody believed the inmates who insisted they'd got the wrong guy. Of the two, writes Krause:[Andre] Smith got out faster because he had an attorney who made inquiries on his behalf. Still, he said he's not happy that his pleas of innocence went unheeded for so long at the jail."They never verified anything, even when I asked them to," Smith said...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on March 18, 2011 (boomark / email).