Mistaken Identity: No Fingerprints, No Problem!

Cases of mistaken identity are generally every day occurrences all over the world, but one man from Tennessee got the brunt of that situation when he was arrested and sent to an out of state prison when Nashville police failed to make sure that they had arrested the right man.

Tommie Rice, an employee at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville was arrested on December 15^th when he was mistaken for a man named Tommie Simpson out of Maryland. As it turned out, "Rice" was an alias last name of the man wanted in Maryland and this is what led police to make the arrest. The police partially blame Rice for the mistake, because they insist that he was not firm enough in the statement that he had never even been to Maryland, much less was he a wanted man in that state.

Nevertheless, the Nashville police failed to do what a layman would assume that they would do upon arresting anyone: cross checking their fingerprints with those of the wanted person. Of course, in this case the fingerprints did not match and they could have saved the near $2,500 that was spent transporting him to Maryland. The mistake was not uncovered until after Rice had already spent both Christmas and New Year's in a Maryland jail.

Are people really willing to accept this as the "honest mistake", a representative for the Nashville police claims..? Or is it merely a severe lack of attention to detail or a lack of caring on the part of the individuals handling the case? Was it because he was black that his fingerprints weren't run? And even if not, should the reason they were not run really matter at all? It stirs the question, "how many people are spending time in prison who should not be simply because someone failed to do something critical?".

Rice insists that the picture that they used to compare his photograph to doesn't even look like him, but the police say that only when the pictures are enlarged do they look dissimilar. In a book listing wanted men, police say that the pictures are small enough that they look like the same person.

As for the status of Tommie Rice, he was fired after he didn't show up for work, but his superiors at Vanderbilt Hospital have given him his job back on the grounds that there were extenuating circumstances. He returned to Nashville by bus after declining the offer of a plane ticket from the Montgomery County, Maryland PD.

Perhaps what this should teach us is that if you are ever arrested in what you believe is a case of mistaken identity, make sure you tell the police firmly enough that you are not the person in question or you could, like Tommie Rice, end up spending 3 weeks in jail. Is there a logical reason that police would make a mistake like this or were they simply too careless with a man's life?