Oregon man spends year in jail due to bad govt database

[dead0man]

link-local

Nicholas Chappelle spent nearly a year at Snake River Correctional Institution after he was arrested and convicted for driving with a suspended license.

But he never should have spent a day behind bars.

Chappelle is one of untold numbers of Oregonians stopped by police, arrested, put in jail and even wrongfully convicted based on faulty DMV information -- a breakdown in record-keeping that has existed for years but the state never fixed.

By the time a Columbia County prosecutor realized Chappelle was innocent, he had lost his job as a union ironworker and missed the birth of his son while held at the medium-security prison in eastern Oregon, far from his family in Scappoose.

Chappelle never questioned the charge, having relied on his defense lawyer, the prosecutor and state records. He even pleaded guilty to the felony.

His case highlights a major flaw in how the state Department of Transportation’s Driver & Motor Vehicle Services Division records license suspensions resulting from criminal convictions:

The DMV essentially marks suspensions as indefinite and keeps them on someone’s record forever. It has no system in place to consistently show when suspensions end.

The DMV has improperly recorded approximately 3,000 driver’s licenses in the last two decades as suspended indefinitely through either 12/31/9999 or 00/00/0000, according to data obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request.

[dead0man]

Well this is awful.
A modernization of this would be a worthy use of taxpayer money.

is "give them more money" always the answer when the govt screws up?  Imagine if other entities operated that way.

The Catholic Church-sure we raped a lot of kids, give us more money and we'll fix it!
BP-sure we spilled a kajillion barrels of oil into the gulf, give us more money and we'll fix it!
The American Auto industry-sure we strangled the Golden Goose and somehow ran out of money, give us more and we'll fix it!


oh yeah, we did do the last one.  Well, we let the govt convince us it was the best thing to do and then let them do it.

[dead0man]

Well this is awful.
A modernization of this would be a worthy use of taxpayer money.

is "give them more money" always the answer when the govt screws up?  Imagine if other entities operated that way.

The Catholic Church-sure we raped a lot of kids, give us more money and we'll fix it!
BP-sure we spilled a kajillion barrels of oil into the gulf, give us more money and we'll fix it!
The American Auto industry-sure we strangled the Golden Goose and somehow ran out of money, give us more and we'll fix it!


oh yeah, we did do the last one.  Well, we let the govt convince us it was the best thing to do and then let them do it.

Stop rambling. Of course the lack of proper record keeping here is due to insufficient staff in thus insufficient money. For Christ's sake trying to compare it to the Catholic sex scandal. It's cringe-worthy yellow Avatar pablum

At best, it's a poor allocation of resources (another govt skill).  It's not a lack of money, Oregon has plenty of money.  It's a dumb system, set up by dumb people and implemented by people who don't care what happens to regular jerks.

The DMV has no idea how many people have been charged and prosecuted because of the erroneous records, but DMV administrator Amy Joyce acknowledges the problem has gone unaddressed for years.

It appears DMV officials learned of the lapse at some point in the past, Joyce said. But it’s not clear exactly when and it “wasn’t at a high enough level to understand the urgency” to figure out a remedy, she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

[dead0man]

Why was his lawyer not able to fix this before he got convicted?

the guy actually believed it when they said his license was still suspended.  He was, in theory, supposed to be given paperwork when he got out of prison that he had to turn in to start the ball rolling on ending his license suspension.  Oregon prisoners have to do this because of the stupid system Oregon has set up.  He never got the paperwork or lost the paperwork, but there doesn't need to be any paperwork.