Jail Again Frees Slaying Suspect Erroneously

For the fifth time in little more than a year, an inmate being held on homicide charges has been mistakenly released from the Los Angeles County Jail, Sheriff’s Department officials said Friday.

Even though Sheriff Sherman Block and his chief aides have recently given assurances that they were remedying the flaws in their inmate tracking system, Gregory Stinson, 31, was erroneously freed from the Men’s Central Jail early Thursday morning because of an error by a clerk in the jail’s Inmate Reception Center.

This latest incident further exposed the vulnerability of the county’s overcrowded jail system, which holds about 19,000 inmates on any given day.

“We are all extremely embarrassed,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Daniel L. Burt. “Whenever we let someone out of jail, that’s a major mistake on our part and everyone knows about it. Instead of throwing up our hands, we are working very hard to come to grips and fix this thing.”

According to sheriff’s officials, Stinson remained at large Friday, along with three other inmates erroneously set free over the past 15 months--for reasons ranging from miscommunication between law enforcement agencies to paperwork errors at the jail.

Stinson was arrested in 1993 by Los Angeles Police Department detectives after he allegedly killed the boyfriend of a woman he knew, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said.

The prosecution was put on hold, however, pending a mental competency evaluation. Stinson, who was sent to Patton State Hospital for testing, was certified incompetent to stand trial in July 1994 and was being held pending further court hearings, officials said.

The murder charge against Stinson was dismissed in Superior Court on Tuesday, but was immediately refiled in Municipal Court, officials said. That new filing, however, was not entered into jail records by a sheriff’s clerk, and Stinson--who was being held on $1 million bail--was set free Thursday.

“It’s our error, but it’s an error that occurs in a far less than perfect environment,” Burt said.

“The staff is under tremendous amount of pressure. . . . That whole paperwork process is literally like Grand Central Station at rush hour.”

The other homicide-case inmates mistakenly released since July 1995 are:

* Pedro Quezada, 21, who was being held in connection with a 1991 killing in Los Angeles. He was released from jail this past August after a clerk misunderstood his paperwork. Quezada later turned himself in to sheriff’s deputies in Fontana.

* Juan Espino, who was released just nine days after his first-degree murder conviction this past July 10 for the 1994 killing of a Hollywood drug dealer. Jail officials said they let Espino go because they never received necessary paperwork from the Probation Department. Espino remains at large.

* Anait Zakarian of Glendale, who was released from the Sybil Brand Institute in July 1995 after a sheriff’s clerk confused her name with that of another inmate. Zakarian was awaiting trial in the 1994 slaying of a Glendale travel agent. She remains at large.

* Angel Moya, who was released from jail in August 1995 after miscommunication among law enforcement agencies over the filing of manslaughter charges in connection with a drunk-driving accident. Moya, who allegedly killed a woman in the accident, remains at large.

After Espino’s mistaken release in July, Block announced that law enforcement agencies would hold a series of meetings to come up with ways to avoid further gaffes.

Later that month, Quezada was mistakenly released--on the same day that representatives of the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office, the Superior Court and other agencies were holding their first session to deal with the problem.

Block could not be reached for comment Friday.

In a May series focusing on problems in the county’s jails, The Times reported that the sheriff’s inmate tracking system badly needs upgrading and appears inadequate to provide basic management information to jailers.

On Friday, Burt said sheriff’s officials have come to realize that until the department has an upgraded computerized tracking system in place--linking the Sheriff’s Department with the courts and other law enforcement agencies--additional errors probably will occur.

“As long as you’ve got human beings with poor penmanship and poor reasoning skills, you are going to have mistakes,” Burt said. “One day it will be electronic and it will be transferred over cable and it will take care of itself. We are working very hard toward that.”

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Officials hope to have the first part of the system--which would still rely on human input of data--operational sometime next year, Burt said.

Attorney Merrick J. Bobb, the special counsel overseeing the implementation of reforms in the Sheriff’s Department, recently urged the department to upgrade its computer system and to simplify its paperwork process.

In his sixth semiannual report to the department, he wrote that the staggering number of inmates entering and leaving the county jail system “creates many opportunities for error, compounded by the confusing and differing paperwork that may accompany a given inmate.”

“Any mistaken release of somebody who is suspected of a heinous crime is obviously a serious matter,” Bobb said Friday. “But you have to look at how many inmates go through that facility in any given year in the Los Angeles County jail system. It’s about 200,000 inmates a year.”

The jail system draws inmates from 10 Superior Court districts and 32 Municipal Court districts, each of which “seems to have developed its own sets of forms or paperwork,” Bobb wrote in his report.

The risk of mistaken releases, Bobb said, “could be reduced if there were uniform, clear paperwork received in a timely fashion by the jails.”

“Even better would be an automated information system that did away with much of the paperwork entirely,” he wrote.