CLPEX Chat Board

Can anyone shed any light on this case (full article in this week's Detail, and at the link below the text)

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Rojas was stopped on June 22 by Bayonne police officers on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail because they said he did not have the proper identification for his reduced fare ticket.

A subsequent warrant check led police to believe that Rojas was a man wanted in Southern Florida for allegedly jumping bail in a narcotics case. The fugitive, Emannuel Rojas, uses the name Manny Rojas - and the same Social Security number and date of birth - as an alias, a U.S. marshal said at the time.

After his arrest, Rojas was taken to police headquarters where Police Chief Robert Kubert said that fingerprints they sent through their Livescan computer program came back as a match to the fingerprints attached to the fugitive, sought since 1999.

Rojas was sent to the Hudson County jail in Kearny for four days before a fingerprint comparison conducted by U.S. marshals in Newark uncovered that the prints, in fact, did not match. He was released from custody on June 27.
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KaseyWertheim wrote:
After his arrest, Rojas was taken to police headquarters where Police Chief Robert Kubert said that fingerprints they sent through their Livescan computer program came back as a match to the fingerprints attached to the fugitive, sought since 1999.

I'm guessing the first thing everyone is thinking is, "I'd like to see those prints!"

So if I'm reading this right, Rojas was taken to HQ and his prints were ran through Livescan. As a result of the Livescan search, he was matched to the fugitive's prints.

So was there ever a human comparison done in the first place, or was it just very coincidental that the fugitive's key number was the top result from his search, and had a high enough threshold to be considered a "lights out" match?

There seems to be a lot of critical information lacking here.

Of course I do not know what system was used. But we may all be jumping the gun when we say....show me the prints!!

Every ten print card has to be 'pinned' to a criminal record. Maybe someone should be doing checks to ensure that the right fingerprints are being assigned to the right criminal record history. The fingerprint match may well have been correct.....it was the demographic data that wasn't!!

cheers

Dave

I worked in a jail ID unit for many years. Many police officers, correction officers, court screeners, and inmates probably assumed because we were taking fingerprints we were also verifying warrants but my job was to identify inmates, not to verify warrants.

Many times people being arrested would tell the police officer, “This isn’t my warrant” and the officer would say, “They’ll verify it”. Then when they’re booked into jail the arrestee would tell the booking officer the same thing and then get the same reply. This could continue through the fingerprint person, the court screener, and eventually to the judge. In my area it wasn’t uncommon for it to take 2-4 days until the arrestee actually saw a judge. One time I was sitting in court, just to observe the process, and an inmate told the judge it wasn’t his warrant. The judge asked some basic questions to verify whether or not the warrant belonged to this person. Fingerprint verification was never asked for.

On the other side of the coin, all warrants can’t be verified through fingerprints and far more inmates claim to be falsely arrested than actually exist. From what I’ve seen, the best someone can hope for when they’re in a situation like this is to hope that they run into a sympathetic person that will look into it. Unfortunately we all have jobs to do and can’t always take the time to look into every story we hear.

From my own experiences I wonder if the warrant was really verified through fingerprints or if Manny Rojas just thought it was.

I’m also wondering who is responsible for verifying warrants?

Dave Charlton wrote:Of course I do not know what system was used. But we may all be jumping the gun when we say....show me the prints!!

What I mean by "show me the prints" is that I want to see Rojas' prints and I want to see the Livescan prints that he was matched to. I'd also like to know how those Livescan prints were said to make him a match to the fugitive.

Every ten print card has to be 'pinned' to a criminal record. Maybe someone should be doing checks to ensure that the right fingerprints are being assigned to the right criminal record history. The fingerprint match may well have been correct.....it was the demographic data that wasn't!!

cheers

Dave

When I worked in 10-Print, part of what we did was to try and clear up arrest records with the proper people. The problem was that we needed a card showing an initial arrest for the crime to say if the person at the office was actually arrested for the crime. Some times there wouldn't be a set of prints for the initial crime - only those taken on warrant arrests. If the person at the office had previously been arrested on a warrant but no initial prints existed, I couldn't say if it was or wasn't theirs.

Also, after re-reading the little blurb of info, it says that the prints were run and "their Livescan computer program came back as a match to the fingerprints attached to the fugitive, sought since 1999." I'm not that familiar with the Livescan prints, but how does a search of a NJ database (assuming their linked to their state, but it could be local?) verify a South Florida warrant?

Was the ID only a match to a possible previous arrest of Rojas? So essentially they verified his information which, by name, SS#, DOB, is attached to the S. Florida warrant? How does the chief say that his fingerprint match verified the warrant?

Then the extension of that is what was done differently so that the US Marshal was able to compare the prints and say they weren't a match? I'm guessing that the US Marshals actually got the prints from the warrant out of FL, while the print comparison in NJ only verified a name which matched Rojas. After reading the article, which states that his paperwork with his ID information was left at an ex-girlfriend's house, I think that it's an ID theft in combination with an improper attempt to verify a warrant. It doesn't sound like it's an actual 10-P error, or at least erroneous ID at the 10-P level.

Another possibility is that the warrant information had the person they had in custody's information on it. This includes FBI and State ID numbers. We've seen that quite a few times in tenprint. It's common when two people either just happen to have the same name and dob, or someone has used each others information. I'm not sure how it works when inputting the information into the system for the warrant. In our office we will only verify a warrant if we can find the original charge on their rap sheet (which is verified by fingerprints). The individual also has to have been printed on the day of the arrest and not for a warrant that was issued without taking fingerprints. We've seen to many individuals arrested for someone else's warrant and then they have a rap sheet with that warrant in their criminal history. If we cannot verify it by fingerprints then it has to go before a judge. One question I have is did someone actually check the livescan machine for the State ID number? Where I'm at it seems that even though the agencies and jails have this ability no one is using it, or even knows how to. That is one of many things that scare me about lights out. And, if they did check the State ID number did they just run a rap sheet and see same name, dob, and social security number and call it good?

As was written to me in an email from Michele Triplett:

I think that assuming the article has the correct information is giving a newspaper story too much credit.

Date: 2005/07/05 Tuesday
MISTAKEN FOR FLA. FUGITIVE

By JASON DEL REY, JOURNAL STAFF WRITER


What's in a name? For Manny G. Rojas, four days in the Hudson County jail.

The 28-year-old Bayonne resident's name is one of the aliases used by a
South Florida fugitive - a coincidence which, for the second time in four
years, put Rojas behind bars.

Rojas's latest nightmare began on June 22, when he showed police his
half-fare ticket on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. The cops were making
routine fare checks at the time. Police said Rojas didn't have the
disability identification required to buy the reduced rate ticket, although
Rojas - who said he suffers from back problems and a bone disease - said he
did show them a Medicare Health Insurance card, which would entitle him to
the reduced fare, according to NJ Transit's Web site. However, Bayonne
Police Chief Robert Kubert said police reports have no mention of Rojas
displaying that card to officers.

In any event, a warrant check led police to believe that Rojas was the man
wanted in Southern Florida for allegedly jumping bail in a narcotics case.
The fugitive, Emannuel Rojas, uses the name Manny Rojas - the same Social
Security number and date of birth - as an alias, said Supervisor Deputy
Marshal Joe Godsk of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Bayonne's Rojas was taken to police headquarters, Kubert said, and
fingerprints they sent through their Livescan computer program came back as
a match to the fingerprints attached to the fugitive, sought since 1999.

"The fingerprints on the warrant that (the Marshals Service) faxed us
matched the guy that we had," Kubert said.

On June 23, Rojas entered a not guilty plea at Central Judicial Processing
court in Jersey City. He was then transferred to the Hudson County jail,
where he was held until U.S. Marshals straightened out the mistake on June
27.

"That jail is just horrible," Rojas said. "People are animals."

Rojas said he tried to explain to cops, his public defender and the judge
that he wasn't the man they were looking for, but no one believed him. He
said he began to fear that he'd never be able to convince anybody that they
had the wrong man.

"I was so scared. I thought that was it," Rojas said. "I thought my life
was over."

Rojas was finally released June 27 after federal marshals determined the
fingerprints of the man in jail did not, in fact, match those of the
Florida fugitive.

The U.S. Marshals Service refused to release a photograph of Emannuel
Rojas, nor even to provide a description of him. A representative of the
U.S. Marshals Service said the agency only releases information about its
"15 most wanted" fugitives and other major cases.

Rojas said he'd left his Social Security card, birth certificate and other
identifying documents at a girlfriend's house after a bad break-up in 1996
or 1997 and never retrieved them. He suspects those documents were somehow
used to steal his identity.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Mike Schroeder said officials are looking into that
possibility.

"Identity theft is not completely off the table," he said. "That's
something we will follow up on."

Rojas's harrowing experience may sound like the script of a Hollywood
thriller, but for Rojas, it was a sequel: Cops in New York City made the
same mistake in 2001, sending him to Rikers Island for two days. That time,
too, he was released after a fingerprint check determined he wasn't the
fugitive Rojas.

At the time, Rojas said U.S. Marshals told him he should hire an attorney
to straighten out the problem, but he said he told them he didn't have the
money.

"They told me, 'Well, we'll see you the next time you get in trouble,' " he
said. "I haven't even jaywalked in four years."

He's also concerned that the fugitive or someone else has taken out credit
cards under his name, racking up thousands of dollars in charges.

But Rojas says he'll have to find a way to straighten this out in order to
avoid a third trip to the slammer.

"Otherwise, where do I go next time I get pulled over for anything?" Rojas
said.

He also said he's "exploring his options" about filing a lawsuit following
his recent arrest.