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I did read the article.... but what I read was very biased towards Ramirez. Perhaps I can quote some of this to you and lay out my case that way. Ramirez, 29, a teacher at Charles R. Drew Middle School in Compton, was arrested after a student there identified him as the man who kidnapped her at gunpoint in May 2002

The officer arrested the accused. That is his job, that is the law. The officer appaently took the backpack into evidence (how else would it be known if the backpack had fingerprints or not). When evidence is taken into custody, the officer no longer has control of it. It either goes to processing (think CSI) or it goes into storage for trial.

It is the DA's office that is responsible for determining if their is enough evidence to go to trial. Apparently the DA did think they did have enough evidence because they went to trial and lost, the man was found not guilty.

People who are arrested and get the charges dropped, or are later acquitted, often think that they can sue the arresting officer for false imprisonment (also known as false arrest). These lawsuits rarely succeed: As long as the officer had probable cause to arrest the person, the officer will not be liable for a false arrest, even if it turns out later that the information the officer relied upon was incorrect.

A common example of a false arrest situation is where an officer may arrest a black kid suspected of shoplifting, with no real suspicion that the kid did anything wrong, just because he may have been the only black kid in the store.

What is NOT clear by the article is under what color of law did the jury find that the officer did not have probable cause. What IS stated is

"arrested Mr. Ramirez and basically shattered his life based on the unreliable eyewitness identification of a teenage girl who was mistaken," said Ramirez's attorney, Michael Artan

So his attorney STATES that the eyewitness identified Mr. Ramirez. That is probable cause.