The Navajo County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to enter into an agreement with Arizona Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC) for the National Criminal History Improvement Grant at the meeting on March 13.
Navajo County Attorney’s Office Manager Lynda Young stated, “Perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice is for someone who has been arrested for a crime, proved to have committed the crime, but because there isn’t a good set of fingerprints, may be exonerated for the crime. Or, the criminal actually served time, but because the fingerprints are not recorded properly, the crime would be missing from the criminal’s history.”
Young went on to say, “During the normal case flow process, an offender is ordered to get fingerprinted prior to coming to court. If the offender fails to get fingerprinted, the court may not or cannot always check to see if fingerprints for this crime are on file.”
The grant project total is $27,212 with ACJC contributing $24,491, leaving the county responsible for the remaining $2,721 to purchase a stand-alone fingerprint scanner that will be housed in the security area next to the courts. If an offender does not have fingerprints on file, the court will send them down to the scanner to be fingerprinted before they return for sentencing.
County Attorney Brad Carlyon said, “This project addresses a gap in the fingerprinting history.” Carlyon then gave the board a brief overview of how the process works, “There is a yellow sheet that starts at the time of the arrest; law enforcement makes the arrest and list the charge(s) the defendant is arrested for. The yellow sheet moves with the defendant to the county attorney’s office where the charges can be modified and may or may not be the same as the original arrest record. Then it moves into the court. At the court it can be modified again. If the fingerprint cards are not there, the yellow sheet goes away leaving no record.”
Carlyon closed his comments by saying, “The use of this machine should get us pretty close to 100 percent compliance. We would be the first in the state to get that close.”
