Video justice
Quote of note:
Who figured that out? Not the police. The father of one of the women got a copy of the records, came to Prince George's and asked a prosecutor to review them. She recognized the mistake and arranged for an emergency hearing to dismiss the case. After 22 days in custody two of the three women were released from the county jail, and the third, a 17-year-old, was freed from a youth detention center in Arizona. At the time, police offered no apologies and no help paying for the trip home to Arizona.
Paying for Bum Raps
Friday, November 12, 2004; Page A24
A SINGULARLY terrible example last year of sloppy detective work, erroneous arrests, coercive interrogations and wrongful jailings by Prince George's County police in a 2002 murder case has been quietly papered over with an undisclosed amount of public money to settle lawsuits. The money is going to three Arizona women who were rounded up, jailed and charged with the murder of a Mitchellville woman found strangled in her home. Even before police hauled them in, two other innocent women -- sisters from the District -- had been jailed for several weeks in the same case until DNA tests exonerated one and the other proved that she had been away on business at the time. And the case is still unsolved.
As reported by The Post's Ruben Castaneda, police focused on the Arizona women after the TV show "America's Most Wanted" aired a segment on the murder, including photos from a bank security camera showing the women using an automated teller machine near the victim's home a few hours after the slaying. A caller on a tip line identified them.
