The Long Memory of the Law’s Computer : Crime: A routine check turned up a 13-year-old warrant for an escaped convict from Alabama. People may forget, but the machine doesn’t.

Warren Lawson forgot about it. Police in Birmingham, Ala., forgot about it. Almost everyone, in fact, forgot how Lawson shot and wounded a policeman in 1972 and then escaped from Alabama State Prison four years later.

But an FBI computer in Washington remembered. And when Lawson, 41, was picked up by Los Angeles police four months ago for beating up his girlfriend, a routine check of his fingerprints caused the machine to dredge up a 13-year-old warrant for his arrest.

Police officials said Lawson’s fugitive warrant is one of the oldest they can remember.

When the fingerprint match was established this week, Los Angeles police detectives returned to East 113th Street in Watts to rearrest Lawson, an unemployed painter. On Friday they were making plans to extradite him back to Alabama.

“He was surprised. He wasn’t sure what he was being arrested for until we showed him the warrant,” Detective Doug Lemelle said.

Alabama prison authorities said they will take steps Monday to have Lawson returned. They said he was convicted in 1974 of assault with intent to kill a Birmingham police officer. He was serving a seven-year sentence at the minimum-security Red Eagle Work Farm near Montgomery when he slipped away on June 2, 1976.

Authorities in Montgomery said Friday that they had long ago stopped looking for Lawson.

“I’ve never heard of him,” said Montgomery Police Detective Don Letford, a 10-year veteran of the force.

Retired Patrolman Benny Allison Sr., the Birmingham officer that Lawson was convicted of shooting, was surprised to learn Friday that Lawson had been recaptured. That’s because nobody remembered to notify Allison that Lawson had escaped.

“Nobody ever called me to tell me. They should have notified me, but nobody told me,” said Allison, now 63.

Allison said he was shot in the lower stomach when he confronted Lawson and two other men breaking into a car in a parking structure outside a Birmingham bank. Lawson pulled Allison’s service revolver from its holster while the officer wrestled with one of the other suspects, he said.

The wound left Allison partially paralyzed and forced his retirement after 22 years with the Birmingham department, he said.

John Hale, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections in Montgomery, said Alabama law requires that his agency attempt to extradite Lawson.

“He still owes the state time,” Hale said.

But in Los Angeles, Lawson’s girlfriend said she hopes that Alabama has a change of heart.

“I cried all night,” said Diana Washington, 39. “He’s a good man. He’d tried to put his troubles behind him.”