Manhunt is underway for a murder suspect mistakenly freed from L.A. County custody

The witness looked straight ahead and remained silent.

Steven Lawrence Wright’s refusal to testify in the murder trial of two gang members earned him a five-day sentence for contempt of court. But that defiance also proved to be his ticket to freedom, at least for now.

Wright, who was in jail on a murder charge and pending sentencing for attempted murder, was mistakenly released Saturday from custody after serving the contempt sentence.

Wright, 37, is now the subject of a manhunt as urgent as the one touched off last month by the escape of three inmates from an Orange County jail.

L.A. County Sheriff’s Department officials, like their Orange County counterparts, are examining their procedures to see what went wrong.

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Sheriff’s Cmdr. Keith Swensson said it appeared that a series of errors made by the court clerk and three Sheriff’s Department employees led to the mistaken release.

A copy of the clerk’s instructions released by the court Tuesday shows that the clerk entered the court docket number of Wright’s murder case, instead of the contempt charge, next to details of his sentence.

“This one page erroneously told us to release this person on the murder charge,” Swensson said.

The clerk’s mistake was then compounded during a three-step review at the jail, Swensson said. No one there noticed that the clerk also left a handwritten note at the bottom of the form with the case number of the contempt charge. Though ambiguous, it was a red flag, Swensson said.

In a practice established recently to cut down on human errors, a reception clerk, a supervisor and a backup checker all reviewed the transmittal from the court.

“All three looked at it and believed the information was correct,” Swensson said. “But it wasn’t.”

On Tuesday, the Sheriff’s Department offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to Wright’s capture. Authorities are following numerous tips.

“We believe he is still close by,” Swensson said.

Before his release, Wright was being held on suspicion of killing Donnell Taylor, 47, in January 2011.

During the trial, Wright’s former girlfriend testified that he was a leader of the Altadena Blocc Crips gang and was known by the moniker Trey Mac.

A month after Taylor was killed, one of Wright’s friends was also killed, and his girlfriend turned against him.

“I was seeing how it was affecting more people, how many more people were getting killed, and like, the retaliation process,” she testified.

She said she felt conflicted because of her feelings for Wright but wanted the violence to stop, so she agreed to cooperate with authorities.

“I loved him, but I knew or felt that, you know, a lot more people would be hurt in the long run,” she testified.

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Wright was convicted in 2014. But in early 2015, a judge overturned Wright’s conviction because prosecutors had failed to turn over to his defense information that would have challenged the credibility of his girlfriend, said Stacie Halpern, one of Wright’s attorneys.

Wright’s next court appearance was scheduled for Feb. 24. He was expected to be sentenced for a separate attempted murder conviction with gang enhancements and faced at least 32 years to life in prison, said another defense attorney, James Sussman. He was also scheduled to appear for a pretrial hearing related to his retrial on the murder charge.

“I found out late Sunday and I was really surprised that the county jail would make such an error,” Halpern said. “I haven’t had something like this happen in my 16 years of practice. It was nothing my client did. My client had a good shot at his murder trial and a good defense.”

The Inmate Reception Center, in the downtown jail complex where Wright was held on the contempt charge, processes more than 100,000 releases annually and only a fraction of those are errors, Swensson said. In 2013, deputies accidentally released 24 inmates early, he said. In 2014 the number fell to 21, and last year that was cut to six, he added.

In 2013, deputies accidentally released Johnny Mata, who was being held on suspicion of murder for a killing in Baldwin Park. Police found him about a year later in Mexico.

“That was really the last one that was significant,” Swensson said.

Still, Swensson concedes that the system for processing about 1,000 inmates a day from 42 courtrooms badly needs modernizing.

Though inmate records are eventually entered into a database, there’s no electronic path for communications from the court, he said.

“We believe there should be an automated system between the court and the jail that would prevent human errors,” he said.

“It’s all done by hand,” he said.

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Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.

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