Fumbled data spawns bogus arrest

PALMER -- A courthouse data error sent a church secretary to jail for about two hours after she was pulled over for driving with a headlight out earlier this month.

The false arrest took place Jan. 10. On Wednesday, Jan. 28, Court System Administrator for Alaska's Third Judicial District Wendy Lyford said steps have been taken to make sure the error doesn't happen to anybody else.

"This incident was the result of a record keeping error by the court system," Lyford said. "… we have to say that we did make an error."

Court clerks have recalled all outstanding traffic warrants from the Palmer courthouse in order to make certain that the mistake doesn't happen to anyone else, according to Lyford.

Tracey Baskett is skeptical of that.

Baskett was on her way to Palmer to deliver a meal to a family that had just welcomed a new baby. Her son Robert, 13, was in the car with her. Robert was wearing dark sunglasses and a hat, goofing off and was dressed for a birthday party. Baskett told her son to take off the glasses -- she said

he looked like those famous police sketches of the

Unabomber.

"I was afraid they would think I was drunk because we were laughing when they pulled us over," Baskett said.

The Palmer Police officer asked for her license and went back to his patrol car. Soon he was back at Baskett's car informing her of an outstanding warrant and telling her she would have to be arrested. She was frisked, handcuffed and taken away. A second patrol car came for her son. Baskett said the officers were polite, and took time to explain to her son what was happening when she asked him to. Within an hour or so Robert would be teasing his mom from the just-visiting side of the glass at Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility.

Bobby's father Randall Baskett got a phone call at home asking him why he hadn't come to pick up his son. He was livid, according to his wife.

"He was very upset, but I was rather calm," Tracey said. "But thank goodness we had the $100."

When her husband bailed her out, Tracey was asked to sign some paperwork. She wrote "not guilty" on the papers and left. On Monday, a clerk called from the courthouse to say she had been exonerated, and the Basketts have since received a refund.

So how did this happen?

Lyford said the mistake was a combination of a data entry error apparently made three years ago and a failure to correct the bad data when the court system upgraded its computers in Palmer last month. Lyford is responsible for the work of about 230 clerks who process information at the 13 court houses of the Third Judicial District.

Lyford has had the job for five years and said about two people each year are arrested on quashed warrants out of more than 20,000 cases that come through the third district courts. Those are usually situations in which a warrant is issued and then quashed but the person is arrested before the police know the warrant was set aside, according to Lyford, who said Baskett's warrant was different.

"I haven't heard of a situation like this in my five years here," Lyford said.

Baskett's bogus warrant originated from a traffic accident during the summer of 2000 when she was cited for failure to exercise due caution after rear-ending another car in Wasilla. At that time, the Wasilla police and the Alaska State Trooper fish and wildlife enforcement division had citation booklets with overlapping citation numbers, according to Lyford. And the court system was relying on law enforcement agencies to provide case numbers for violations, which won't happen again, according to Lyford, who said the new computers will eliminate that.

Baskett paid a fine for the Wasilla traffic violation in 2000. A court clerk was supposed to add one character to the citation number before entering it into the courthouse database so it would not be confused with a trooper citation carrying the same number.

The extra character wasn't added, and three years later a new courthouse computer alerted clerks that Baskett had an outstanding warrant for allegedly ignoring her traffic citation.

"It's a pretty unusual misalignment of the planets," Lyford said.

So what are the odds of this happening again?

"Right now, there are virtually no odds of that, because [court clerks] have recalled all of their traffic warrants and they are going through them manually," Lyford said. "So there's virtually no odds that this could happen to anyone else."