St. Louis city, police, pay $62,500 to man jailed by mistake (with Comment by PHB)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Robert Patrick

ST. LOUIS • 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 jail records obtained by the newspaper last week show that police and jailers knew within nine days that they had arrested and incarcerated Jones on another man’s warrant. Yet they continued to hold him for two months more.

Because of the settlement, a federal judge dismissed the suit on Feb. 4. The police and city were each to pay half, with Jones’ lawyers to receive a share.

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.

An associate city counselor said that no one from the city or the police department would comment on the Jones case.

Jones’ lawyers, Jason Charpentier and Teneil Kellerman, cited the settlement’s confidentiality provision in declining to comment or to make their client available for an interview.

It is not clear how the settlement might affect a similar, pending federal lawsuit. Its lawyer, James Hacking, failed to win class-action status for such claims but is talking with the American Civil Liberties Union about working together to try again.

‘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.”

Late on the night of Nov. 6, 2009, Jones said, he left a bar on Holly Hills Avenue, near Interstate 55, and was questioned by police after a peace disturbance unrelated to him. He said officers let him go after five to 10 minutes.

He then walked through the neighborhood, stopping at friends’ houses to look for a place to sleep.

He also stopped at a 7-Eleven, in the 6700 block of South Broadway, for cigarettes, got into a dispute with the clerk and was warned off by an off-duty police officer working security, he said.

When he passed by later, the officer summoned him over, ran a records check and arrested him when Crumble’s name came up. It was not clear why police would mistake one man for the other.

Jones said in his deposition that after asking for his handcuffs to be loosened, he was pepper-sprayed in a police car and never allowed to wash off the chemical. He also said that when he protested at the police station that he was not Crumble, he was told to shut up.

In a police report, Officer Joseph Jones, no relation, said that Travis Jones was warned away twice, and was pepper-sprayed and arrested after entering the store and walking toward the officer in a “confrontational manner.”

The report says that at the South Patrol Division, Jones was booked as both himself and Crumble. But Crumble was already in jail; he had been arrested on Oct. 21, jail records show.

COMPLAINTS IGNORED

Jones said he called out to everyone who walked past him while he was in the Justice Center downtown, the deposition says, telling them he was not Crumble. Most ignored him, he said. Only two said they would look into it.

Three relatives, he said in the court documents, called workers at the jail, sheriff’s office and court system, and were told that there was nothing that could be done — that the mistake was due to “a computer error or something like that.”

Jail records show that employees knew at least as early as Nov. 16, 2009, that Jones was held on another man’s charge.

“This inmate is incarcerated in error,” an entry that day reads.

The records and other documents produced as part of the lawsuit show that a jail employee then notified an employee of the police department, the jail clerk who tracks prisoners and a sheriff’s lieutenant. Another jail employee then began working on the problem.

Just under an hour later, Jones refused all services offered to new inmates, “ ... stating he will be leaving and the charges he is here on are not his charges,” the document said. But Jones would be sorely disappointed.

Two days later, staff told Jones — who last held a regular job a decade ago and lives on disability payments — that he “ ... has to get a lawyer to get a court order to get a fingerprint to be released.”

Jones believes he was finally freed because he asked Crumble, who he met for the first time while in jail, to talk to Crumble’s lawyer about it. Jones was released Jan. 22, 2010.

Jones, who was in foster care as a child and was homeless at 14 and again at 17, receives monthly disability checks of $640, and pays $300 a month in rent, court records show.

He said he has struggled with job applications, due to reading and writing problems, and suffers from schizophrenia.

Jones estimated that he has been arrested more than 20 times, with one felony conviction, for a drug offense. Online court records show just one misdemeanor trespassing conviction in Missouri. A clerk in the municipal court said there were no records for Jones there.

Before his arrest, he said in a deposition, he spent his time watching movies and TV, playing pool and entertaining women. He told lawyers he lost contact with his two children while in jail and was exposed there to humiliation, disease, mice and bugs.

Asked about his “emotional distress,” he responded, “Pain physically and mentally, and every time I see a cop, I’m nervous, for one. Sometimes I don’t even want to go outside my house ... because I get stopped and harassed all the time by police, and it took me a long time to find my kids again.”

OFFICIALS REACT

Last year’s Post-Dispatch findings on wrongful arrests were disputed by Jennifer Joyce, the circuit attorney, and Eddie Roth, then operations director and jail point man for Mayor Francis Slay.

They insisted that mistakes could be found only in a tiny fraction of mainly older cases. They also said some cases identified by the Post-Dispatch involved people who would have been jailed on their own charges at the same time anyway.

St. Louis Sheriff James Murphy reacted to the newspaper findings by distributing forms for inmates to report mistaken arrests. His office provides courthouse security and prisoner transportation to court from the city-run jails.

Joyce’s office relayed requests for comment about any recent changes that could affect the mistaken arrest issue to Assistant Circuit Attorney Ed Postawko, who did not respond.

Slay spokeswoman Maggie Crane said the police department now has installed mobile fingerprint scanners at all booking points and is working on merging “disparate computer systems.”

St. Louis Presiding Circuit Judge Philip Heagney said he plans to “double-check” on progress toward preventing mistaken arrests.

He said, “I’m not aware of any concrete changes that have taken place.”