Rules Planned to Avoid Identical-Name Arrests

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has agreed to adopt new regulations to protect citizens with common names from the possibility of arrest and days or weeks of jail time on warrants issued to someone else with the same name, according to lawyers who challenged the current system.

The new regulations, which will require deputies to verify physical descriptions and double-check suspects who claim they are being wrongly arrested, represent a settlement of nearly seven years of litigation over the computerized warrant-checking system that serves as a repository for more than 1.1 million arrest warrants pending through more than 30 law enforcement agencies in Southern California.

A 1980 class-action suit brought by the Center for Law in the Public Interest in Los Angeles claimed that the routine practice of running names through the Los Angeles police’s Automated Wants and Warrants System has resulted in more than 1,000 innocent people being arrested each year for crimes they did not commit.

Plaintiffs in the suit included a 22-year-old man, Michael Smith, who spent more than seven days in jail before convincing authorities that he was not the same Smith wanted on four separate arrest warrants, and William Jones, a 23-year-old man held 14 days on a variety of warrants.

In one instance, a UCLA professor had to appear in court on an arrest warrant issued to someone with the same name after law enforcement officials failed to verify his claims that he was not the suspect, said Joel R. Reynolds, attorney for the public interest law firm that filed the suit.

“The lawsuit was filed to prevent the arrest and incarceration of innocent persons for the crime of having a common name,” Reynolds said.

“The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has now properly recognized the need for additional safeguards in its use of computerized warrant systems, from the standpoint of protecting the innocent victim and, for the department’s part, of adopting the most efficient, accurate and economical law enforcement practices.”

The lawyer for the county who negotiated the settlement was not available for comment Friday, and Sheriff’s Department spokesmen said they were not familiar enough with the case to publicly discuss it.

The settlement, approved last week by Superior Court Judge Norman R. Dowds, is similar to a separate agreement negotiated in the case in 1984 with the Los Angeles Police Department, which maintains the 17-year-old computer warrants system through subscriptions with other law enforcement agencies such as the Sheriff’s Department.

Under the agreement, sheriff’s deputies will be required to enter all available descriptive information into the computer when lodging an arrest warrant, including driver’s license number and obvious physical characteristics, and suspects must be provided a printout of the warrant information when they are brought to the station on a warrant.

If they protest that they are not the suspect sought, sheriff’s officials must search all available records to confirm the identification, and suspects who are cleared will be given a “clearance document” to present to other law enforcement officials should they be detained again.