A New Jersey woman who was detained and imprisoned for two weeks due to a mistaken identity cannot sue the U.S. marshals who arrested her because they are shielded by qualified immunity, a court determined.
Judith Maureen Henry was put into the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark in 2019 after marshals caught her, mistaking her for another woman with the same name who pled guilty to narcotics possession and violated her parole in Pennsylvania in 1993.
Henry attempted to sue the marshals over the error, but a three-judge appellate panel concluded Thursday that the marshals acted under a “constitutionally valid” warrant and were shielded by qualified immunity, which shields law enforcement from punishment for misconduct.
“Their arrest of Henry based on information attached to the warrant was a reasonable mistake, and thus her arrest did not violate the Fourth Amendment,” Judge Thomas Ambro of the United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals stated in the decision, according to the New Jersey Monitor.
During her 2019 arrest, Henry repeatedly told marshals that she was not the person they were looking for, and she requested that they compare her fingerprints to those of the genuine culprit. Nobody matched her fingerprints until 10 days after her arrest when she was transported to Pennsylvania, and she stayed in jail for a few more days before being freed.
“Henry’s complaint — that the Marshals failed to take her claims of innocence seriously — raises a host of policy questions about the role of the Marshals Service after they apprehend a suspect on a warrant for a crime they did not investigate,” according to Ambro.
The judge stated that these considerations include how strong a claim of innocence must be before a marshal investigates, who should investigate, and how thorough the investigation should be. He stated that a reasonable observer could assume that the answers to these questions would be simple to obtain and would place “minimal burdens” on the marshals.
However, Ambro wrote that Congress should address those policy problems.
He also stated that the marshals were not involved in Henry’s ongoing imprisonment.
The court also rejected Henry’s claims that she was treated unfairly because of her race, gender, national origin, and poor socioeconomic level.
“We need not accept this bare conclusion, and she offers no other allegations to support it,” Ambro said.
A district court had denied the marshals’ plea to dismiss Henry’s lawsuit against them, but Ambro overturned the decision and ordered the marshals to withdraw the action.
Outside of the marshals, Henry’s lawsuit named Essex County and approximately 30 law enforcement officers and government officials from New Jersey and Pennsylvania as defendants, accusing them of abuse of process, false arrest, and imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, failure to train and supervise, and conspiracy.
