Shannon Renee McNeal was torn from her screaming children by police who were seeking a woman with a similar name — a woman who they should have known had been murdered seven months before. ¶ A clerical mistake set up the arrest, sloppy attention to fingerprints put her behind bars and months of indifference to the error cost McNeal her home, $15,000 and, for a while, her job driving a Metro bus.
Yet she may be luckier than scores of others who have been wrongfully arrested and spent weeks, even months, trapped behind bars in a broken St. Louis city justice system.
The Post-Dispatch has identified 100 people arrested in error over the past seven years. Collectively, they spent more than 2,000 days in jail — an average of about three weeks each. One man alone was incarcerated 211 days. About a quarter were held repeatedly — one of them, five times — and 15 were locked up while the right suspect was already behind bars.
Almost all the mistakes could have been prevented — or at least fixed immediately — had authorities paid attention to what fingerprints tried to tell them from the start.
Officials' reaction to McNeal: It was her own fault, because if her name had not been in a criminal justice database, the mistake could not have been made.
Confronted 21 months ago by reporters with examples of several wrongful arrests, Jennifer Joyce, the circuit attorney, and Eddie Roth, a senior aide to Mayor Francis Slay, expressed concern and pledged reforms.
But their response has hardened since the deeper Post-Dispatch investigation.
"I worry about a lot of things. I don't worry about this," Roth said in a recent interview. He said he has faith in the system's ability to correct mistakes.
He insisted that wrongful arrests are merely a byproduct of a system in which suspects have a lot of problems, including "telling the truth."
The Post-Dispatch examination found several recurring problems: ..Continued.. by The Post-Dispatch
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