Apology form Colonal MacLeash
State police offer apologies to two in mistaken arrests
By TERRI SANGINITI, The News Journal
Posted Friday, September 29, 2006
This man is being sought in two recent bank robberies.
Joanne Bateson's house remains in disarray from the state police raid on her home last week. Shards of glass from a sliding door litter the ground outside.
Thursday evening, a week and a day after a state police SWAT team raided her home and arrested her son for a bank robbery investigators later determined he did not commit, the Angola woman received a phone call from state police Col. Thomas MacLeish, who apologized.
His agency was executing a warrant for Dover police, in whose jurisdiction the robbery occurred.
A night earlier, MacLeish called Teri Pruitt and offered her a formal apology for the arrest of her son Monday night in a bank robbery last week in Bear.
Police believe the same person -- a husky man wearing a white plaid shirt and a white cap -- committed both robberies. But after arresting Bill Pruitt and Bateson's son, Brock Charles, police found neither of them to be the robber.
"I realize what they have undergone has not been a pleasant experience for them," MacLeish said after talking to the families.
He told Bateson that the state would pick up the tab for the broken kitchen door, she said.
"It's a mistake and we're going to make up for it," he said Thursday.
MacLeish said both warrants were executed in good faith.
In both cases, the wrong man was identified: first by the public who tipped off police to the bank robber's identity, and then by the victimized bank tellers, who each identified the suspect from a photo array.
Pruitt, 25, of the 600 block of Huckleberry Ave. in Bear, was picked up Monday in the Sept. 22 heist of Citizens Bank, 146 Fox Hunt Drive in Bear.
Charles, 22, of the 32000 block of Ashwood Drive in Lewes, was arrested Sept. 20 in a holdup the day before at the Wilmington Trust Bank on Walker Road in Dover. He was jailed at the Delaware Correctional Center and released Sept. 21 after his mother posted $10,000 cash bail.
Dover police dropped the charges against him the next day -- the same day the white-capped bandit struck in Bear -- because his cell phone records verified he was on a construction job in Lewes when the Dover bank was robbed.
"We know these guys are innocent of the bank robbery because of their alibi," Widener Law Professor Jules Epstein said. "Imagine if that guy didn't have the cell phone that day. Where would he be now? These guys are luckier than other victims of mistaken identification because they had a really good alibi."
The scariest thing, Epstein said, is even if the two had not had alibis, they would have been just as innocent.
Technically, legally and constitutionally, the police followed the law. But some percentage of eyewitnesses always make mistakes, he said.
"How big is the problem, I can't say," Epstein said. "But it's a recurring problem."
MacLeish said state police have encountered such situations before.
"This is the first time I'm aware of it occurring on my watch, and it will always be made right," he said.
MacLeish said in the Pruitt case, the detective used the witness identification to get a probable cause warrant, which was approved by a judge and executed by troopers.
But when Pruitt said he had an alibi for an attempted robbery Monday at the PNC Bank in Talleyville, committed by the same white-capped bandit involved in the other robberies, the detective asked that he be freed on bail pending further investigation.
"If that victim had not picked him out, he would not have been arrested," MacLeish said of Pruitt. "We know that people can be mistaken."
Teri Pruitt said she demanded MacLeish expunge her son's bank robbery record, and the colonel said he would move as quickly as possible to do so.
Bateson, however, will have to turn to Dover police, who obtained the arrest warrant for her son.
"My son has been flashed all over the [TV] screen that he's a robber," the angry mother said. "I asked him about the record being expunged, and he referred me to the Dover police who swore out the warrant. But the state police are the ones that sent this crap into my home. They took it upon themselves to come into my house smashing the door."
Pruitt said she accepted MacLeish's apology because she knew he had a job to do. But words can't make up for the embarrassment she and her son have experienced, she said.
"I asked him if he knew how it feels to walk out your door and have to hang your head in embarrassment," she said. "I'm a brand new neighbor here and your first impression is a lasting impression that never goes away.
"My son's a good-hearted person, and what's he's done in his life, he's paid his dues," Pruitt said. "But he doesn't deserve to be called a bank robber."
