A New Jersey A woman who was arrested and spent two weeks behind bars due to mistaken identity cannot sue the U.S. marshals who arrested her because they are protected by qualified immunity, a court ruled.
Judith Maureen Henry was admitted to the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark in 2019 after marshals detained her, mistakenly believing she was another woman of the same name who pleaded guilty to drug possession and gave up her parole in Pennsylvania in 1993.
Henry sought to sue the marshals over the error, but a three-judge appellate panel ruled Thursday that the marshals were acting on “constitutionally valid” warrants and are protected by qualified immunity, which shields law enforcement from liability for wrongdoing.
The US “His arrest of Henry based on the information attached to the warrant was reasonable error, and therefore his arrest did not violate the Fourth Amendment,” Judge Thomas Ambro of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the ruling. New Jersey Monitor.
Henry repeatedly told Marshalls During her 2019 arrest that he was not the person they were after and asked her to compare his fingerprints to the real culprit. But no one compared the fingerprints until 10 days after her arrest, when she was transferred to Pennsylvania, and she remained locked up for another few days before she was finally released.
“Henry’s complaint — that the marshals failed to take his claims of innocence seriously — raises several policy questions about the role of the Marshals Service after apprehending a suspect on a warrant for a crime they did not investigate,” Ambro wrote.
The judge said those questions included how strong a claim of innocence should be before a marshal’s investigation, who should investigate and how thorough the investigation should be. He said a reasonable observer would be easy to find answers to these questions and would impose “minimum burdens” on marshals.
But, Ambro wrote, it should be up to lawmakers to address those policy questions.
He also noted that Marshall was not involved in Henry’s continued detention.
The court also rejected allegations by Henry, who is black and from Jamaica, that she faced this treatment because of her race, ethnicity, national origin and lower economic status.
“We need not accept this bare conclusion, and she offers no other allegations to support it,” Ambro wrote.
A district judge denied Marshall’s request to dismiss Henry’s litigation against them, but Embro overturned that ruling and ordered the judge to remove Marshall from the lawsuit.
In addition to the marshals, Henry’s lawsuit named about 30 law enforcement officers and government officials in Essex County and New Jersey and Pennsylvania as defendants, accusing them of abuse of process, false arrest and imprisonment, infliction of emotional distress, intentional infliction, failure to train and supervise. was Conspiracy
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