OR - Mistaken Identity

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Y2K discussion group : One Thread

Computer error sends man to jail for 43 days. Lawyer says it could happen to you.

The plot is familiar: A police computer confuses a guy with someone else, he's thrown in jail and assaulted by thugs, and prison guards laugh when the innocent victim says there's been a mistake.

But what sounds like a cinematic cliché actually happened to 44-year-old Roger Parkinson Benson, who spent 43 days in jail thanks to a computer error by the Oregon State Police.

Two weeks ago, a Portland jury awarded Benson $300,000 for his unlawful detention, but his attorney says the computer problems remain unsolved--and that hundreds of Oregonians' records may have been similarly corrupted.

On Aug. 3, 1999, Benson, a handyman in the tiny Northern California town of Horse Creek, was arrested in Siskiyou County, Calif., after getting in a scuffle with a woman. A computer check showed three felonies in his background, and authorities found a .22-caliber pistol in his car. They charged him with attempted murder, assault, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

In reality, Benson was not a felon and had never spent a night in jail. But thanks to the error in his record, he was facing a sentence of 25 years--minimum.

Benson spent 43 days in a Siskiyou County jail awaiting trial, where inmates "used me for a punching bag," he says. But then his alleged victim was arrested for assault and a probation violation, lending credence to Benson's claim that she attacked him. The attempted murder and assault charges were dropped, and Benson was released pending trial on the gun charge, allowing him to figure out what had happened.

It turned out that in 1998, Benson was pulled over for a traffic ticket in Lane County. Because he was not carrying identification, his fingerprints were taken and entered into the Oregon state police computer--where they were erroneously confused with a three-time felon.

Two years ago, he brought a civil suit in Multnomah County Circuit Court against the state of Oregon, which resulted in the six-figure jury award Aug. 2. But Benson isn't done. He and his attorney say that Oregon counties have mistakenly assigned duplicate serial numbers to other fingerprint sets, and the state lacks a fail- safe mechanism to weed out the errors. His attorney, Charles Carreon, an Ashland lawyer and former prosecutor, found a list of 97 cases in Lane County where two identities were merged, meaning 194 people were affected. He's since heard from a woman in Marion County who had police walk into her workplace and arrest her due to a similar case of mistaken identity.

"We have documentation that on May 28, 2002, there were still duplications," says Benson. "We have documentation that one guy got credited with four people's records. I mean, this is a horrendous deal."

Lt. Cliff Daimler of the Oregon State Police identification unit says the problems have been rectified. "We corrected all 97 [Lane County mix- ups] as soon as we were made aware of them," he told WW. "We're certainly not aware of any issues in other counties."

But OSP spokesman Lt. Glenn Chastain conceded that "to verify every single entry that comes in would be impossible," so it remains unclear just how much corrupted data lurks in police computers.

Carreon fumes at "a cabal of denial" among the state police. "It took them a year to fix what could have been corrected in a day," he says. Now he plans to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the aggrieved parties.

"There's no reason why this couldn't happen to you or me," says Carreon. "It's like identity theft by the state."

Willamette Week Online

-- Anonymous, September 03, 2002


Moderation questions? read the FAQ