How to Untangle Theft of Your Identity in a Crime
Our criminal justice system depends upon law enforcement, court clerks, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys to ensure a criminal violation of the law is treated fairly and accurately. In nearly twenty-five years of practice, however, one can see that the system does not work perfectly.
This is mostly due to human error rather than an intentional act to corrupt the system, although that does take place on rare occasions. This human error sometimes results in consequences that are significant.
For example, we had a client who used to live in California, but moved to Texas. Long after he left California, a person was arrested for DUI in Los Angeles County. His driver’s license number was the same as our client’s driver’s license number except for one digit. In our client’s driver’s license, one of the numbers was a five and in the other person’s license, the number was a six.
As luck would have it, the other person was booked and the police officer mistakenly wrote down his driver’s license with a five, rather than a six. Therefore, when the individual lost his DMV hearing, our client’s license was suspended, rather than the actual DUI suspect. When the same individual was convicted in court, the court clerk recorded the individual’s driver’s license as our client’s driver’s license, resulting in a further suspension of our client’s license.
The actual DUI suspect, coincidentally, never had his driver’s license suspended after the DUI, either by the DMV or the court. Instead, it was our client who suffered the suspension.
Likewise, our client, not knowing about this suspension, never took action to lift the suspension or correct the situation.
Until one day. On that day, our client’s employer in Texas told our client that he had a hold on his Texas driver’s license due to a suspension on his license in California. Our client was confused by this and called our office.
Our office then researched the case and went to the Metropolitan Courthouse to get the judge assigned to the actual DUI case to issue a Certificate of Identity Theft, using judicial council form CR-150 and CR-151, Petition for Certificate of Identity Theft.
In our client’s case, we filed the Petition for a Certificate of Identity Theft and the judge did sign the Certificate of Identity Theft: Judicial Finding of Factual Innocence, finding that “another person was arrested for, cited for, or convicted of a crime under the identity of petitioner in this case” and that “petitioner’s identity has been mistakenly associated with a record of the criminal conviction in this case.”
The clerk in the courtroom then issued our client a green-colored form called “Judicial Clearance” on form CR-16, which was something our client could carry on him to produce for a police officer to show he was cleared from any association with the Metropolitan Court case number, which was written on the form. The CR-16 Judicial Clearance form was signed by the judge and had an official Los Angeles Superior Court stamp on it.
Our client then presented this to the Texas DMV so he could get the hold on his license lifted.
The Texas DMV responded that California had to first release the hold on our client’s California license. On his own, the client then presented the California DMV, Mandatory Actions Unit, in Sacramento with the same Judicial Clearance form.
Nothing happened. The California DMV refused to release the hold and our client still could not get his Texas driver’s license.
So, Greg went back to court and, luckily, both the judge and the clerk assigned to the same department had changed.
Greg explained the difficulty our client was having with the California DMV and the clerk, who had decades of experience, immediately recognized the problem. She explained that the prior clerk should have also prepared a DL-157 “Abstract / Document Error” form and she should have transmitted it to the California DMV.
The clerk then prepared such a form and transmitted it to the California DMV from the court. The problem was at last fixed.
We present this article to help out anyone facing the same situation, as it is probably more common than one may think.
For more information about identity theft issues, please click on the following articles:
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