Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before authorities realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Times investigation has found.
The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including officials’ overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.
The errors are so common that in some years people were jailed because of mistaken identity an average of once a day.
via ID errors put hundreds in L.A. County jails – latimes.com.