Mistaken Identity

Name foul-up puts man in jail
Fugitive is another James Anderson
BY SUSANNAH A. NESMITH
snesmith@herald.com

For years, James Douglas Anderson knew the police might arrest him one day, even though he committed no crime.

A man with the same birth date named James Daniels Anderson has been wanted on a drug charge in Miami-Dade County since 1970.

So when Pinellas County sheriff's deputies arrived at James Douglas Anderson's job last week, he told them they had the wrong guy, as he had told various officers in the past.

But they carted him off to jail anyway, charged with James Daniels Anderson's crimes.

It took six days, and the intervention of the public defender's office, to spring James Douglas Anderson from jail.

The confusing incident has led to finger-pointing between Clearwater and Miami. Pinellas sheriff's officials say they were just complying with a request from the Miami-Dade Police Department. Miami-Dade officials say they never said to go arrest the wrong man.

And Anderson's attorney says: ``I'm going to send a letter to both and ultimately a lawsuit will be served on both and they can sort out the culpability.''

''How do you explain a six-day detention when it would take no more than 15 minutes to do the fingerprint comparison?'' attorney John Trevena said.

Those were hard six days for a man who has never been arrested as an adult.

''I thought I was going to die in there,'' he said in a phone interview from his home in Pinellas County. ``A maximum security jail, it was awful.''

BACK IN 1970

It all started in 1970, when the warrant was issued in Miami-Dade County for James Daniels Anderson on marijuana possession charges.

Several times during the intervening years, police around the state asked James Douglas Anderson about the warrant.

Each time, he explained that it wasn't him, just someone with an almost identical name and the same birthday. And each time, after a bit of checking, police let him go.

Anderson said he called Miami-Dade officials once to see if there was anything he could do to sort the thing out. They told him he would have to come to Miami to deal with it.

''I was afraid to come down there because I thought I might never get out of there,'' he said.

Then the law came for him.

On Aug. 1, Miami-Dade police sent a letter to Pinellas officials with the warrant information and James Douglas Anderson's address, retrieved from a commercial database and driver's license records.

''After 30 some years, what prompted them to send this?'' asked Pinellas Detective Tim Goodman. ``We were working on the information they provided us.''

Miami-Dade says: Why didn't Pinellas check the fingerprints?

''If I pick somebody up for a warrant and I'm unsure, whoever issued the warrant then I call them, or we will send the guy's prints to be matched up,'' Miami-Dade Detective Bobby Williams said.

When Anderson got to the Pinellas County Jail on Aug. 13, he was fingerprinted and insisted he was not the right man.

JUST WAITING

But no one at the jail requested the fingerprints from James Daniels Anderson. They were just waiting for Miami-Dade police to come pick up James Douglas Anderson.

Bill Braun, a Pinellas public defender's investigator who heard about the situation from Anderson's friend, called the arresting deputy.

''She informed me she knew he was the correct person and refused to request prints from Dade County [police] for comparison,'' Braun wrote in an e-mail to his boss that was provided to The Herald.

'She added, `he even admitted that he should have gone to Miami to get this straightened out.' ''

So Braun contacted Miami-Dade police and asked them to send a copy of James Daniels Anderson's fingerprints to Pinellas.

The fingerprint information arrived Tuesday and in less than an hour the comparison was made and the order sent up to release Anderson.

Herald database editor Tim Henderson contributed to this report.
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