Can Prints Lie? Yes, Man Finds to His Dismay

In front of the immigration judge, the tall, muscular man began to weep. No, he had patiently tried to explain, he was not Leo Rosario, a drug dealer and a prime candidate for deportation.

He was telling the truth. He was Rene Ramon Sanchez, an auto-body worker and merengue singer from the Bronx who bore not even a passing resemblance to Mr. Rosario, a complete stranger 12 years his junior and a half-foot shorter.

"Why don't you get his photo then?" Mr. Sanchez cried out in Spanish, pounding a fist into his palm. "And compare my fingerprints with his?"

The judge, Alan L. Page, had been told the prints were the same. "The general rule is, the prints don't lie," Judge Page had said earlier. "If you got the same prints that Leo Rosario has, you're Leo Rosario. And there's nothing I can do about it."

So Mr. Sanchez, in late 2000, was sent back for another week in a grim detention center in Lower Manhattan, severed from his family and livelihood, because his fingerprints had been mistakenly placed on the official record of another man.

Remarkably, this was not the first time Mr. Sanchez had paid for that mistake. He had been arrested three times for Mr. Rosario's crimes, and ultimately spent a total of two months in custody and was threatened with deportation before the mistake was traced and resolved in 2002.

Mr. Sanchez's ordeal, unearthed from court records and interviews, amounts to a strange, sometimes absurd odyssey through a criminal justice system that made a single error and then compounded it time and again by failing to correct it.

The limits of fingerprint evidence have been much in the news. An Oregon lawyer jailed as a material witness in the Madrid train bombings was freed this month after the F.B.I. said it had mistakenly matched his prints with others found near the scene of the attacks.

Mr. Sanchez's case, if less dire or public, is no less chilling a lesson in how easily a person's identity can be smudged in this era of shared databases, and how long it can take to cleanse it ? particularly if, like Mr. Sanchez, he speaks little English and has a minor police record of his own.

Over the two years in which his fate was tied to a man he had never met, the authorities repeatedly discovered the crossed identities and freed him. But until his lawyer filed notice that he intended to sue the state, no one tracked down and fixed the root problem: the faulty fingerprints in the state's vast criminal justice files.

At the immigration hearing in late 2000, Judge Page acknowledged the possibility, however slight, that an error had been made.

"Unfortunately, this type of problem you can't unsolve ? you can't undo ? in two minutes," he told Mr. Sanchez. "If it's a mistake," he added, "it's a terrible mistake."

The first mistake was made by Mr. Sanchez, a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic. On July 15, 1995, he was pulled over in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and charged with driving while intoxicated.

But what happened next ? as laid out in court records and in an affidavit by William J. Sillery, the state criminal justice official who helped untangle the mess in 2002 ? was a monumental piece of bad luck, and bad timing.

When the police fingerprinted Mr. Sanchez, then 33, they wrongly placed the prints on a card that bore the name, Social Security number and other data for Leo Rosario, a 21-year-old Manhattan man who had been arrested the night before on charges that he had sold a bag of cocaine to a police informer, Mr. Sillery wrote. The police then mailed the card to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, where Mr. Sillery was director of the office of operations.

Police departments across the state typically fax fingerprints to Albany after an arrest. But the faxed prints are often replaced with clearer copies that are mailed in later. "In this case, therefore, Rosario's actual fingerprints were replaced in our base files with Sanchez's fingerprints," Mr. Sillery wrote. (Spokesmen for his department, the police and immigration authorities declined to comment on the case, citing the lawsuit Mr. Sanchez has filed against each of them. The lawsuit, still pending, charges false arrest and imprisonment and deprivation of his constitutional rights.)

The errant fingerprint card lay dormant in the files for the next three years, as Mr. Sanchez went back to his life repairing cars, singing part time and visiting his two young daughters. The D.W.I. case was dismissed, said Andres M. Aranda, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Sanchez.

But in August 1998, Mr. Sanchez was stopped again by police officers, who said he had been swerving from lane to lane on Amsterdam Avenue in upper Manhattan. He admitted that he had drunk four beers, the police noted, and he apologized.

He was charged with D.W.I. and jailed for four days before being led into State Supreme Court in Manhattan, where the clerk announced his case as "Calendar No. 45, Leo Rosario."

Apparently a new set of prints taken from Mr. Sanchez matched those on Mr. Rosario's card in the files. Since his cocaine arrest, Mr. Rosario had pleaded guilty to an attempted drug sale, then violated his probation by disappearing, said a spokesman for the city Department of Probation. A warrant had been issued for his arrest.

"What's your name?" Justice Bonnie G. Wittner asked the man in front of her, according to the court transcript.

"Rene Sanchez," he replied.

"This is supposed to be Leo Rosario," the judge said.

Mr. Sanchez said through an interpreter that he was not Mr. Rosario.

"Who is this person here?" the judge asked.

As she tried to get that question answered, Mr. Sanchez seemed uncannily prescient about the real problem. "Get my prints," he said. "Maybe there was a mistake with my hands."

New prints were ordered, as they would be again over the next two years, but because of the earlier mix-up, they would always match the ones in Mr. Rosario's file.

This day, however, a court probation officer, Vera Thompson, checked a mug shot of Mr. Rosario, and said it did not match the man in court. Justice Wittner released him.

Even though the D.W.I. charges were ultimately dropped, the warrant for Mr. Rosario remained in place. It tripped up Mr. Sanchez again a year or so later, he says, when he was stopped for a defective taillight. An officer ran his license; he was handcuffed and taken into custody. It appears that by then Mr. Sanchez's name was linked to Mr. Rosario's in law enforcement computers as if it were an alias, leading the authorities to Mr. Rosario's warrant.

"I thought this was not possible, that the problem had been solved by the judge," Mr. Sanchez said. He said he was released after several hours after it was determined he was not Mr. Rosario.

His next brush with the law would not be so brief. On Oct. 11, 2000, returning from a visit to relatives in the Dominican Republic, he was taken into custody by an officer in the baggage-claim area at Kennedy International Airport and was told there was a warrant for his arrest under the name of Leo Rosario. Apparently, as he had passed through a checkpoint, his name had again snagged him.

The next day, he went before Justice Wittner, who appears not to have recognized him from his case two years earlier. She fended off his urgent pleas to be heard, saying she would hear him a day later, when his lawyer could be summoned.

It is unclear why, but no lawyer appeared the following day, and as Mr. Sanchez stood alone in court, the confusion grew. A court probation officer told the judge that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had made a formal request that Mr. Rosario be held for deportation proceedings.

Hearing that, Justice Wittner said she would end Mr. Rosario's probation and hand him over to the immigration service. "He'll have to face whatever charges he is facing," she said.

Mr. Sanchez, beyond astonishment, asked, "What case?" He said he was not aware he had any immigration problems.

"I don't know," the judge said, adding later: "I'm not an immigration judge. I have terminated your probation. I don't know about your other problems."

"Please, permit me to speak," Mr. Sanchez said in exasperation. "Please. Please, Miss."

"I can't help you, sir," she concluded.

Mr. Sanchez was held for about a week at a jail in Lower Manhattan, then moved to an immigration detention center on Varick Street, where he lived with scores of other detainees. When the guards called him Rosario, he answered, "My name is Sanchez." He felt abandoned and afraid.

"I was very confused, actually, because I thought, `There's so much intelligence in this country ? why is this happening to me?' " he recalled.

More than a month after he was stopped at the airport, Mr. Sanchez was finally taken before the immigration judge, Alan Page, who explained that the government wanted to deport him. "They claim that back in 1996 you were convicted of attempted criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree," Judge Page said, according to recordings of the hearings that were obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mr. Sanchez, who again had no lawyer beside him, denied that. "I always work, pay taxes," he said at one point.

"You sure you got the right guy?" the judge asked the immigration service lawyer, Anne Gannon, who said she would "have them run the prints again."

"You better do something," the judge said, adding later, "A.S.A.P. ? maybe you got the wrong guy."

Settling that matter would take four more hearings and another month in jail for Mr. Sanchez. He ate little, his 185 pounds dropping to 165, and his hair began to fall out, he said.

At the next hearing, his lawyer, Peter Koenig, was there but the immigration service was missing a crucial file. At the third hearing, on Dec. 7, 2000, the judge said that a new comparison of the fingerprints had been made, and that the government believed "they're one and the same."

"Nobody has ever been able to prove that there are two people out there with the same exact set of prints," Judge Page said. "And they were using fingerprinting, I think, for approximately the last 100 years, or more."

He added: "He's Leo Rosario. There's no other conclusion I can reach."

But a week later, at the hearing where Mr. Sanchez broke into tears, some progress was made: His lawyer indicated that he was trying to obtain a transcript of the 1998 hearing in which Justice Wittner had released Mr. Sanchez.

A few days before Christmas, after someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service had gone to the police and seen Mr. Rosario's photo, Mr. Sanchez was released.

At a hearing a month later, which Mr. Sanchez did not attend, Judge Page remarked, "This is one of those odd situations."

So Mr. Sanchez was not Mr. Rosario, after all? the judge asked an immigration lawyer. "Two completely different people? No way you would mistake them?"

"No, there's not," the lawyer replied.

It is not clear who directed Mr. Sillery, the state official, to investigate two years later, after Mr. Sanchez's lawyer, Irving Cohen, filed a claim with the state that he would sue. But Mr. Sillery wrote in his affidavit that the two men's fingerprint records had been corrected.

Mr. Sanchez, now 42, says he has never received any apology from the authorities, but has had no more problems with them. Before he left on another trip to the Dominican Republic last fall, Mr. Cohen wrote a letter for him to show anyone who mistook him for Leo Rosario, explaining the mix-up.

Mr. Rosario's whereabouts are unknown, but he may not be entirely gone from Mr. Sanchez's life. This month, Mr. Cohen and the other lawyer, Mr. Aranda, went to court seeking Mr. Sanchez's case files. A clerk began searching in the computer, Mr. Aranda recalled, but seemed confused by what came up.

"Are you looking for Mr. Sanchez," she asked, "or Mr. Rosario?"