Black man misidentified by police and jailed for 6 days wins $90,000 settlement

Authored by edition.cnn.com and submitted by Own_Ad6388
image for Black man misidentified by police and jailed for 6 days wins $90,000 settlement

(CNN) A Black man who spent six days in jail after police misidentified him for a 49-year-old White man with an outstanding felony charge, has won a $90,000 settlement from Las Vegas-area law enforcement agencies.

Shane Lee Brown filed a federal lawsuit in January 2022 for at least $500,000 in damages but will be awarded $25,000 from the Henderson Police Department and $65,000 from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police said in a statement to CNN.

Brown's attorney, E. Brent Bryson, told CNN affiliate KVVU that Nevada has a statutory cap of $100,000 when suing a government entity.

Shane Brown during an interview with CNN affiliate KVVU.

In a statement to CNN, the Henderson Police department said, "Shane Brown was driving an unregistered vehicle with a suspended driver license and had a warrant for contempt of court, failure to pay. While his arrest for these charges was lawful, we regret that he was misidentified on other charges in our system and have put measures in place and improved training procedures to prevent this from happening in the future."

Brown, who was 23 at the time, was stopped in January 2020 for driving without his headlights on. At the time, Brown had a warrant for contempt of court for failure to pay.

SpankBankManager on July 8th, 2022 at 18:32 UTC »

I know a girl who recently had this happen to her. She was traveling to Mexico and got arrested at the airport because she has the same name as someone on the FBI most wanted list. She was held in jail for 30 days. She looked nothing like the wanted woman. Hope she ends up with a huge payout.

kandoras on July 8th, 2022 at 17:49 UTC »

What this article doesn't mention is that when they got this guy to the Las Vegas detention center, they booked him in under his correct date of birth and description, and not that of the white guy 25 years older than him.

Which means they didn't didn't just ignore this guy, or failed to notice they had the wrong person. They knew the entire time that they had the wrong guy.

YaketyMax on July 8th, 2022 at 16:47 UTC »

Brown’s attorney, E. Brent Bryson, told CNN affiliate KVVU that Nevada has a statutory cap of $100,000 when suing a government entity.

In case anyone was wondering why he settled for such a low amount.