Long Ordeal Leaves Victim of Mistaken Identity Bitter : Law: Santa Barbara therapist was threatened with a 10-year sentence in robbery. She won a public apology.

Serena Sutherland was hanging laundry in the back yard of her modest home half a mile from the ocean when Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies pounded on her door, waving a search warrant.

A clerk at a nearby liquor store had identified Sutherland, a frequent customer, as the woman who robbed him at gunpoint on New Year’s Eve in 1993. In her den, deputies found a gun--a legally registered pistol--similar to the holdup weapon.

Sutherland, a soft-spoken, 51-year-old mental health therapist, protested her innocence, but was so shaken that she could not recall where she had been that night two months earlier. Handcuffed and driven to the sheriff’s station, she voluntarily took a lie detector test--and flunked. When the liquor store clerk identified her in a lineup, investigators were convinced they had their woman and booked her for armed robbery.

It was a textbook case of detective work. There was just one problem: Serena Sutherland didn’t do it.

For Sutherland, it was the start of an 18-month ordeal as she struggled to prove she was a victim of mistaken identity, then won from authorities an extraordinary public apology.

“The worst of the nightmare was they led me to believe they might come back and get me again,” said Sutherland, the divorced mother of a grown son.

At first, fellow therapists reacted to news of her arrest by shunning her. Friends doubted her. Threatened with the possibility of a 10-year prison sentence, her health deteriorated and she took refuge in her work, counseling emotionally disturbed children and autistic adults.

“Some of my colleagues who refer clients to me were enraged this was in my life,” she recalled. “All of a sudden, people say unthinkable things.”

Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against her. But that wasn’t enough for Sutherland. She petitioned a judge and won a rare court order declaring her officially “innocent.” And she sued for wrongful arrest, winning a settlement of $12,000 from the county and, this month, $15,000 from the liquor store.

The case became such an embarrassment that Santa Barbara County Sheriff Jim Thomas issued an unprecedented public apology this year. “I apologized to her for being the victim of that tragic set of circumstances,” Thomas explained. “I felt that under the circumstances, reimbursing her for her actual expenses was the right thing to do.”

But Sutherland remains bitter about the way she was treated.

Even while she believed she was still a suspect, detectives found the real culprit but never told her. It was not until earlier this year that Sutherland learned from a local newspaper that a woman arrested while climbing through the back window of a Santa Barbara pharmacy had confessed to the liquor store holdup.

A Common Experience

Today, more than a year after charges were dropped, Sutherland still has difficulty discussing her experience. “I still have a lot of anxiety,” she said in a recent interview on a Santa Barbara bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. “My safety, my feeling of being secure in the world, was totally taken from me.”

One of the most striking aspects of Sutherland’s case was that it happened to a middle-aged professional woman who was willing to spend the time and money to restore her reputation.

Legal experts say members of low-income, minority communities frequently are arrested for crimes they did not commit, but seldom, if ever, do they receive an apology--much less restitution.

“Arrests like this happen every day in South-Central Los Angeles,” said Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “If false arrests were a disease that plagued white middle-class people, we would have compensation for it. Since it mainly affects poor people of color, it’s not viewed as that big a problem by society.”

No agency collects statistics on how many invalid arrests occur in California each year. But state Justice Department figures show that in 1992--the most recent year for which data are available--15.6% of those arrested saw their cases dropped before they reached prosecution. Another 10.9% cases were dismissed by a judge. Law enforcement officials say many of these people might well have been guilty, but authorities could not produce enough evidence to prove it.

Police must have “probable cause” to make an arrest but, legal scholars note, that standard is loose enough to give officers considerable discretion.

“Often, descriptions are inexact and police look for suspects with a vague enough description that it could match many, many people,” said USC law professor Martin Levine. “Members of minority groups complain they are often stopped with descriptions so vague that any African American or Latino would match.”

For victims of wrongful arrest, recourse is limited because government agencies and their employees enjoy considerable legal protection for actions carried out in the performance of their duties. Most just let the matter drop, thankful they were cut loose before being convicted, legal experts say.

But not Sutherland, who remains deeply offended by her arrest. “It’s important that people say it’s not OK,” said the reserved, slightly built Sutherland. “Otherwise we’re all in constant jeopardy.”

Sutherland’s trouble began when she went out to dinner with a friend to celebrate the impending arrival of 1994. About 20 minutes after she parted company with her friend at the restaurant, a woman wearing a long coat walked into Magnolia Liquors a mile away, put a dollar on the counter and asked for change. When clerk Jin Lee opened the register, the woman pulled out a pistol and snatched $300.

Within days, owner Kenneth Cho installed a video camera in case of future robberies. On Jan. 17, Cho’s new camera captured Sutherland coming into the store wearing a long coat, sunglasses and a large hat that flopped down over her forehead.

Although Cho had not been working the evening of the robbery, he became suspicious and decided she matched the robber’s description. He followed her out of the store, took down her license plate number and called the Sheriff’s Department.

Lee, the clerk, viewed the videotape several times and believed that Sutherland was the woman who robbed him, sheriff’s records show. Sutherland returned to the store a month later and was puzzled when Cho brought Lee from a back room and the two stood a few feet away, studying her closely and speaking in their native Korean.

In early March, Detective Andrew Standley, accompanied by several deputies, came to Sutherland’s house. They had a warrant to search for her gun and items such as the long coat the robber wore.

As he interviewed Sutherland, the detective became convinced she was his suspect, his report shows. It did not help her case that she made observations such as, “I’ve heard of people having amnesia and doing things like this,” according to the report. And she was so shaken by the detective’s questions that she forgot she had an alibi for the time leading up to the robbery.

Sutherland recalled that Standley tried to extract a confession, saying he knew she was guilty. When she asked what her motive might be, the detective said she liked living on “the edge,” she recounted. Standley declined to be interviewed.

Confident it would prove her innocence, Sutherland agreed to Standley’s suggestions that she take a lie detector test. She had yet to consult a lawyer and did not know the tests can be unreliable.

Faith Lost in Polygraph

Although polygraph examinations are not admissible in court and are banned by Congress for most uses in private industry, they are commonly employed by police to screen suspects who deny their guilt.

The polygraph works by measuring bodily reactions--pulse, blood pressure and respiration--while the subject answers questions. The machine can be fooled by people who lie without emotion, take certain drugs, or believe they are telling the truth. It also can report that a truthful person under great stress is telling lies--as Sutherland’s attorneys say happened in her case.

“I lost all faith in lie detector tests,” said one law enforcement official involved in the case.

Despite her failure to pass the test, Sutherland’s lawyers say investigators had many clues indicating she was not guilty. For starters, there was Lee’s description of the robber.

After the holdup, Lee described her as about 40 years old, five-feet-seven, with brown eyes and brown hair. Sutherland is five-feet-four, has blue eyes, black hair and was 49 at the time.

Lee said the holdup weapon had a long skinny barrel with scratches on it. Sutherland’s pistol has a two-inch barrel and no blemishes.

Attorney William Stewart, who is handling her civil cases, contends that Lee’s identification was tainted because he had watched the video of Sutherland’s store visit numerous times before picking her out of the lineup.

“He was predisposed to finger her,” Stewart said. “His boss was convinced this was the lady. He was under pressure to name her. The only similarities I see is they are both adults, they are both Caucasians, and they are both female.”

Cho, the store owner, declined to discuss the case and Lee, who no longer works there, could not be reached. Paul Bielaczyc, their attorney, also declined comment.

The following April, Santa Barbara police were called to a reported break-in at the Medicine Shop pharmacy. The first officer on the scene discovered 30-year-old Jeana Ruth Purdum crawling through a broken window. In her purse he found a hammer, a knife and a gun.

Police soon linked her to a 1993 bank robbery and she confessed, recounting how she came home from the holdup and showed what she’d taken to her school-aged son.

Soon after, Detective Standley was routinely looking through photos of suspects arrested by Santa Barbara city police when he saw Purdum’s picture. He thought it bore a strong resemblance to Sutherland and called the district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors gave Purdum immunity in the Magnolia Liquors case and she confessed to robbing the store. “She was able to describe the fear in the clerk’s face,” recalled Deputy Dist. Atty. Joyce Dudley, who handled the Sutherland case. “She knew the denomination of the money she put on the counter.”

Purdum was later sentenced to 50 days in jail for her other crimes, followed by a residential treatment program for substance abuse. She now is on five years probation.

The charges against Sutherland were dropped on the day set for her preliminary hearing. But Sutherland and George Eskin, her attorney in the criminal matter, say no one ever bothered to tell them the robber had been caught.

“I lived a year in fear because they told me I would be looked at again if something else came up,” Sutherland said bitterly.

Although he apologized for her arrest, Sheriff Thomas defended his department and praised Standley as a conscientious investigator who deserves credit for solving the case.

“Based on the information that the detective had, he had no other choice but to do what he did,” Thomas said. “The system didn’t fail. There are occasions when we arrest people who we then find out later did not commit the crime and they are released.”

Nevertheless, the sheriff added, “It’s certainly not a sin to apologize.”