A New Jersey woman spent two weeks in jail for violating someone else's parole — and the people responsible for her wrongful imprisonment are clearly constitutionally impeachable, a federal appeals court has ruled.
Judith Maureen Henry, a New Jersey resident, shares a name with another woman who pleaded guilty to drug possession in Pennsylvania in the 1990s and was out on parole. In 2019, this stranger's past caught up with Henry and landed her in Essex County Jail in Newark.
Henry considered prosecuting the U.S. Marshals involved but couldn’t because they were granted qualified immunity under the Fourth Amendment, a legal protection that shields law enforcement officers from liability.
“Henry's arrest was a reasonable mistake based on the information contained in the warrant, and therefore his arrest did not violate the Fourth Amendment,” Judge Thomas Ambro of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the decision. Obtained by New Jersey Monitor.
Henry repeatedly told the marshals that he was not the man they were looking for, and asked them to match his fingerprints to those on file for the real culprit.
No one investigated for two weeks, during which time Henry was put in jail in Newark and transferred to Pennsylvania.
Henry's now-dismissed lawsuit named about 30 other law enforcement officers and government officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania as defendants. That did not include the marshals involved in his arrest.
He accused them all of abuse of process, wrongful arrest and imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, failure to train and supervise, and conspiracy.
Henry, a black Jamaican woman, tried to argue that she was arrested because of perceived prejudice against her race and low economic status, but Ambro rejected that as well.
“We are not required to accept this conclusion, and he has made no other allegation to support it,” Ambro wrote.
