BLAME GAME! – Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Rafael Olmeda has the following:
An accused killer was mistakenly freed from jail after the Broward Clerk of Courts did not produce a routine document telling the jail to keep him there …
Prosecutors dropped a second-degree murder charge against (Eric) Vail in (a) shooting after a grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder for the same crime. He was supposed to be held without bond on the more serious charge, but the clerk’s office never sent that paperwork to the jail.
After the change to Vail’s criminal charges, the clerk’s office never generated a “capias” — or an order to arrest or detain the 28-year-old defendant.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, may have compounded the problem: It wasn’t required to check the clerk’s website to see whether Vail had other cases against him. Sheriff’s officials say checking the clerk’s website is not part of their routine procedures because it’s unreliable “and not an official warrant database.” The jail searches for a capias, a warrant, or a court order, not the clerk’s website …
Even without the capias, whether the Sheriff’s Office should have known to hold Vail remains in dispute. The April indictment contains an explicit court order to hold Vail without bond. Coleman-Wright said it was the clerk’s responsibility to notify the jail about that order with the capias.
But both the clerk’s office and the Broward State Attorney’s Office say they let the Sheriff’s Office know about the first-degree murder case. That information never got to the jail. Once the second-degree case was dropped, jail officials searched for warrants, a capias or some other court order with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement …
“If their query does not have them check their local database to see if the defendant has another case then the query is stupid,” (Howard Finkelstein) said. “The sheriff’s office and the clerk’s office need to stop focusing on blaming each other and start taking measures to make sure this never happens again.”
So, who is to blame?
Brenda Forman or Greg Tony?
YOU MAKE THE CALL!
YouTube: There’s a killer on the road …
BrowardBeat – The Next Election: Good Ol’ Boys Last Stand
… Once in office it quickly became apparently that Ms. Forman was over her head. She was drowning in documents that her office regularly misplaced, we hear.
Now after bungling her job, Ms. Forman is under investigation for lying under oath and other wrongdoing …