Cops Jail Wrong Man For Two Months, Taxpayers Now Have To Pay $62k

We hear about cops knocking down the wrong doors, confiscating property unlawfully, beatings, corruption and such routinely thanks in part to social networking.

Well now, thanks to a foolish mishap by the St.Louis, the city and police will have to pay a man ($62,500) who was wrongfully jailed for more than two months. Taxpayer delight!!!

Here’s what a city paper found during it’s investigation:

The police department and City Hall have paid $62,500 to settle a federal lawsuit by a man wrongly held in jail for more than two months. That works out to more than $800 for each day Travis S. Jones spent locked up. Terms of the confidential settlement, obtained by the Post-Dispatch under the state Sunshine Law, say it “is the result of a compromise and shall not be construed as an admission of any liability, wrongdoing, or responsibility.”

But it gets better, this isn’t a one time occurrence:

Jones was one of about 100 men and women identified in a Post-Dispatch investigation to have been jailed by mistake in the city in recent years, some of them for months.
That investigation, published in October, found that police sometimes failed to verify the suspects’ identities, ignored their claims of a mistake and did not correct errors in records, potentially compounding problems.

Don’t you just hate when that happens? When you are held on another man’s warrant, told by police that “you all look alike.”

Jones was arrested Nov. 7, 2009, on his own charges of trespassing and resisting arrest, neither of which ordinarily entails much jail time. He also was booked as Mark Crumble, who was wanted for violating probation, on the assumption that he might have been Crumble using Jones as an alias. In a deposition, Jones said it marked the second time that night, and the third time in a week, that authorities mistook him for Crumble. The first two times he was released. Jones said he and Crumble look nothing alike. “He had a big face and looked totally different from me. The only thing that was the same was the skin color,” he told lawyers.
He claimed a police officer once told him, “You all look alike.”

It’s a good thing for local investigations or Mr.Jones could still be sitting behind bars. City officials declined to comment.

Source: St.Louis Dispatch