This must be pretty high on the list of history's most unfortunate clerical errors. Los Angeles officials revealed Friday that Johnny Mata, charged for murder in a 2010 gang shooting, was mistakenly released from jail last month due to bureaucratic oversight. Even worse, the department waited until this week to announce the issue, apparently because it wanted to exhaust all possible leads first. The error allegedly occurred when a processing clerk forgot to enter a "hold" in Mata's file in the computer system. He is still at large.
