Never let it be said law enforcement won't get their man. Even if it's the wrong man. And even if they do it twice.
This was Denver native
Steven Talley's first experience with the local PD.
It was just after sundown when a man knocked on Steve Talley’s door in south Denver. The man claimed to have hit Talley’s silver Jeep Cherokee and asked him to assess the damage. So Talley, wearing boxers and a tank top, went outside to take a look.
Seconds later, he was knocked to the pavement outside his house. Flash bang grenades detonated, temporarily blinding and deafening him. Three men dressed in black jackets, goggles, and helmets repeatedly hit him with batons and the butts of their guns. He remembers one of the men telling him, “So you like to with my brothers in blue!” while another stood on his face and cracked two of his teeth. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he remembers shouting. “You guys are crazy.”
Talley was driven to a Denver detention center, where he was booked for two bank robberies — the first on May 14 and the second on September 5, 2014, 10 days before his arrest — and for assaulting an officer during the second robbery.
Surveillance camera footage from the robbed banks had been circulated. Acquaintances and Talley's estranged ex-wife asserted that the man shown was Talley. Using these statements, the Denver PD moved forward with its particularly brutal arrest, one that left Talley with multiple injuries.
In the months that followed, a series of medical exams revealed that Talley had sustained several injuries on the night of his arrest, including a broken sternum, several broken teeth, four ruptured disks, blood clots in his right leg, nerve damage in his right ankle, and a possibly fractured penis.
Talley was held for two months until recordings made by his employer showed he was at his desk on sales calls during the time the May robbery took place. He was released and charges were dropped. But investigators still didn't have the right suspect in custody. So they turned the footage over to the FBI, which put one of its facial recognition experts on the case.
The detective assigned to Talley’s case, Jeffery Hart, had requested that an FBI facial examiner manually compare stills from the banks’ grainy surveillance videos to several pictures of Talley — a tall, broad-shouldered white man with short blond hair, mild blue eyes, and a square jaw.
The FBI analysis concluded that Talley’s face did not match the May robber’s, but that he and the September robber shared multiple corresponding characteristics, including the shape of the head, chin, jaw line, mole marks, and ear features. “The questioned individual depicted” in the September images, the report concluded, “appears to be Talley.”
"Appears." That was enough to justify putting Talley through this whole nightmarish experience again. Talley was arrested again, under the new law enforcement theory that the robberies had been committed by two
different men, both of whom resembled Talley enough
to have him arrested twice.