The Allegheny County Jail warden announced yesterday that he will establish a fiber-optic computer link with the courts to prevent the improper release of inmates after one prisoner who was mistakenly allowed to leave later shot two police officers.

Warden Calvin Lightfoot made the announcement at a special meeting of the county's Jail Oversight Board, which convened eight days after Cecil Brookins, an improperly released felon, shot two Pittsburgh officers in Homewood.

The 2000 release of Brookins -- who is back in jail now on charges of shooting the two officers, both of whom survived -- might never have occurred if the jail had a computer connection with the courts.

"We do not communicate [directly] with each other," Lightfoot said.

Under a long-standing arrangement, incarceration instructions from judges are communicated to records clerks at the jail on a one-page form that sheriff's deputies hand deliver.

Brookins was released from the jail on June 19, 2000, even though a Common Pleas judge had sentenced him to a long state-prison term two weeks earlier. Jail officials claim they didn't receive the form with the sentencing information until June 21, 2000, two days after they had set Brookins free.

The $500,000 or so needed for a fiber-optic computer connection will come from proceeds from the jail's commissary. A total of 27 percent of commissary sales, which amounts to about $500,000 a year, goes into a prisoner-welfare fund that Lightfoot intends to tap for the computer project.

Lightfoot did not offer a timeline for establishing the fiber-optic link, which likely remains several months away.

Lightfoot warned, however, that improper releases may still occur.

"Even if you have the perfect system, errors will happen," he said.

County Chief Executive Jim Roddey has appointed a task force to study how to prevent the inadvertent release of inmates and to determine the extent of the problem.

The task force, chaired by Thomas W. Corbett Jr., former state attorney general and U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, will present its findings and recommendations to the Jail Oversight Board within 45 days.

In agreeing with Lightfoot that improper releases do not occur frequently, Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Manning said yesterday, "In 14 years on the bench, I've never had someone erroneously released."

But Manning, a member of the oversight board, said he can recall numerous occasions when he has authorized the immediate release of inmates, only to find out that they remain behind bars several days later. That, too, appears to stem from a communication breakdown between the jail and the courts.

Post-Gazette

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2002