More than 500 people were wrongly imprisoned in Denver's jails over seven years.

More than 500 people were wrongly imprisoned in Denver's jails over seven years, with some spending weeks incarcerated or pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit before authorities realized they nabbed the wrong person, a federal court filing shows.

Civil-rights lawyers suing the city and county of Denver assert the documented mistaken-identity arrests "are the tip of the iceberg" and are an undercount of the true magnitude of the problem. 

City officials say the documented mistakes make up a fraction of the more than 33,000 inmates incarcerated at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Facility last year. They say they strive to avoid detaining the wrong suspects but concede that mistakes do happen. 

"The best we can do is set up processes so these get addressed immediately, and that's what we've done," said Denver police Lt. Matt Murray.

The mistaken-identity arrests are detailed in a 216-page motion filed at the U.S. District Court in Denver by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. 

The wrongful arrests in Denver occurred for a variety of reasons. Often those wrongly held had the same names as criminals, but authorities failed to check their dates of birth. Some were wrongly arrested because their identities had been stolen. In other cases, the last name matched but not the first or middle. 

It often took days and sometimes weeks before authorities realized they had the wrong person.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_19697991?source=pop