Is a Spell in a Cell Just the Ticket?

Did 22-year-old Merissa Hearn deserve a night in jail after being pulled over for driving with a missing headlight?

Of course not, but from such humble beginnings you can find yourself sitting in a cell with a concrete floor and eating a cold turkey sandwich for breakfast. Because after two Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputies stopped Hearn sometime after 10:30 p.m. Sept. 5, within hailing distance of her parents’ home in Rossmoor, their records check indicated an outstanding warrant for her arrest.

Not knowing what it was for, they cuffed her and hauled her to jail in Santa Ana. That officers later determined the warrant stemmed from a minor ticket Hearn had never taken care of -- the result of being stopped months earlier at a police checkpoint without her driver’s license -- only adds to Hearn’s vexation at spending the next 14 hours in custody.

Some of you are already saying, “You got a warrant, you go to jail. Next case.”

I hear you. But may I timidly pipe up with, “Wait a second. Once deputies at the jail determined what her original offense was, wasn’t there a better option than 14 hours behind bars?”

There’s one other element. Once at the jail, Hearn recalls, she asked a deputy if she could delay making a phone call to her father until she had a better idea of what was happening and whether he needed to bring bail money.

The deputy complied. However, Hearn says, she never got a chance to make the call. Throughout the wee hours and dawn and into the next morning, no friend or relative knew where she was -- nor why she hadn’t shown up for work at 6:30 that morning. Hearn says she asked several times from her cell if she could make a call but was told either that she couldn’t or that she’d be leaving soon and there was no need.

Instead, she says, she wasn’t released until sometime around 1:30 p.m. She spent the same jail time, she says, as women brought in that night for a DUI and a drug-related arrest.

Hearn says she’s remorseful about not handling her ticket. She says she forgot about it because she considered it minor. Still, she says, “to be honest, I don’t understand why I had to stay that long. They were treating me like I was one of their little criminals that belonged in jail.”

Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jon Fleischman wasn’t exactly playing the violin for Hearn after I related her story. He says there would have been a pay phone in her cell. As for her forgetting about the ticket, he says Hearn should have received something from DMV reminding her about it. More to the point, he says, the law requiring driver’s licenses wouldn’t have many teeth and would be liable to open flouting if there were no consequences for not having one.

“There’s no way there was a phone in my cell,” Hearn says after I tell her what Fleischman says. “It was completely bare except for a toilet and toilet paper.” It would make no sense, she says, not to make a phone call had there been one there.

This has all given me a headache and some thoughts, some or all of which might be contradictory. An arrest warrant is serious and necessitated Hearn’s arrest. However, once officers determined the minor nature of the offense, a night in jail was excessive. I realize a jail is a bureaucracy, but surely someone could have seen to it that Hearn got her phone call. They knew she wasn’t Ma Barker.

I ask Hearn if she learned anything. “I learned I never want to go back there again or get in trouble,” she said.

To which I can picture Fleischman and many readers saying, “Precisely.”

OOPS. For bonehead mistakes, it’s hard to picture one worse than lauding someone in a column, then misidentifying him. But I did it Sunday when praising Bill Sharp of Newport Beach for going to New Orleans to help with disaster relief. Unfortunately, I identified him as Mike Sharp.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.