Lawsuit claims wrongful arrests in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS -- The St. Louis criminal justice system frequently makes mistakes on arrests and employees don't have the training to correct them, according to depositions from law enforcement officials taken in a lawsuit filed on behalf of a man who claims he was wrongly jailed for more than two months.

The depositions were filed in court late Tuesday in a lawsuit seeking damages for Cedric Wright, whose attorneys say they plan to ask that the case become a class-action lawsuit, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Wright's attorneys said they found 82 people who say they were mistakenly arrested and held a total of 1,397 days in jail from 2007 through mid-2013. The Post-Dispatch reported Sunday that its yearlong investigation found that mistakes -- many caused by a failure to check fingerprints closely or read emails -- led to 100 people being jailed for a total of more than 2,000 days during about seven years.

The new court filings came from depositions and internal communications of police, jail staff, sheriff's deputies and other officials.

A deposition from Mark Garanzini, a coordinator of the police unit that processes people arriving at the jail, testified that officers occasionally book someone of uncertain identity to see if the charges "stick." He said he spends about 15 percent of his time correcting mistakes on arrest reports and that the unit has struggled with a lack of trained employees for the 20 years he has worked there.

Garanzini also said "prisoner processing procedures do not include verifying that the person named in the warrant is the person they have in custody."

Police supervisors said in the court filings that the understaffing in the identification section increased the risk that a suspect who gives a false name would be released before the lie was discovered.

The Post-Dispatch's investigation found many wrongful arrests when someone using an alias would be released pending charges and the person whose name was given would later be arrested.

The newspaper also reported that many of the mistakes could have been prevented or quickly fixed if police, prosecutors and others read emails alerting them to a discrepancy between a suspect's fingerprints and prints in the state database. The lawsuit claims there is an "egregious pattern" of ignoring those emails.

Eddie Roth, operations director for Mayor Francis Slay, said Wednesday, "It's easy to cherry-pick quotes from hundreds of pages depositions and create a misimpression. We are eager to have our day in court -- where we will be judged by the whole record."

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Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com