Nov. 12 (UPI) — A Kentucky man spent five extra months in jail because a jail employee might have made a data entry mistake, according to an internal review.
David Reyes pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of sexual misconduct, unlawful imprisonment and assault charges in October 2015. He was sentenced to nearly one year in the Metro Corrections jail in Louisville, Ky., and was scheduled to be released on Sept. 25, 2016. But he remained behind bars until Feb. 13, 2017, when his attorney alerted a judge about the prolonged imprisonment.
When Reyes was about to walk free five months later than his original date, he was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. But jail officials said Reyes, a Mexican national, was not intentionally kept longer in order to be handed over to immigration officials, the Courier Journal reported.
The Metro Corrections facility has a policy not to keep inmates longer than their sentence in order to comply with ICE detainer requests, according to Insider Louisville.
An internal review of the matter found that an employee might have typed in the wrong information regarding Reyes’ release date. But there was also the possibility of a computer glitch, due to the jail’s computer system not saving employees’ work in the database.
Reyes said that during his prolonged confinement, he filed multiple grievances to alert jail staff of the problem, but was repeatedly ignored. The internal review did not find any official grievance forms filed by Reyes and could not prove or disprove he was ignored by jail staff.
According to the Daily Beast, other former Metro Corrections inmates claim to have been kept past their scheduled release dates, including two former inmates who filed a federal lawsuit against the facility.
The lawsuit says, “such false imprisonments and unlawful detainments have been regularly conducted … there are hundreds of members of this class.”
