The wrong guy

James Douglas Anderson spent six days in maximum security in the Pinellas County Jail because the Pinellas Sheriff's Department screwed up.

In fact, the sheriff's office didn't just botch Anderson's case of mistaken identity; it botched it royally, and it has made far too many similar mistakes in recent years.

Anderson was hauled away from his workplace on the basis of a 33-year-old warrant from Miami-Dade County for narcotics possession. Even if they had managed to arrest the right man, Pinellas deputies owed Anderson better treatment regarding an ancient warrant for a nonviolent crime.

But Anderson wasn't the right man, and it would have taken deputies only a few minutes to discover that for themselves. Instead, Anderson languished in maximum security for almost a week. He called it "the most terrifying experience of my life."

Anderson asked deputies from the start to check his fingerprints, but nobody bothered to do so until six days later, after Public Defender Bob Dillinger's office became involved in the case. Sheriff Everett Rice says he will enact a policy change to require fingerprint checks before suspects on outstanding warrants are booked into jail. Why it took this case to precipitate that logical change is a mystery.

Deputies might also have checked Anderson's middle name. It is different from that of the man wanted in Miami-Dade. Sheriff's spokeswoman Marianne Pasha suggested, ludicrously, that deputies assumed Anderson's different middle name was an alias.

Rice says he was outraged by his department's failures in the Anderson case, and he promised to make broader policy changes to prevent such mistakes in the future. But a change of mind-sets is as necessary as a change of policies. Rice himself said he can't understand why his office didn't treat the old warrant from Miami-Dade as a lead rather than "a command to go arrest somebody." It's up to Rice to establish policies that protect the rights of Pinellas citizens, and to make sure that personnel throughout the sheriff's department get the message.

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