A New Jersey woman served two weeks of violating someone else’s parole — and those responsible for her wrongful imprisonment are apparently constitutionally shielded from guilt, a federal appeals court ruled.
Judith Maureen Henry, who is from New Jersey, shares her name with another woman who pleaded guilty to drug possession and jumped off her probation in Pennsylvania in the 1990s. In 2019, this stranger’s past caught up with Henry instead, landing her in the Essex County Jail in Newark.
Henry decided to sue the U.S. Marshals involved, but could not, because the Fourth Amendment granted them qualified immunity, a legal protection that shields law enforcement officials from liability.
“Their arrest of Henry relying on information attached to the warrant was a reasonable mistake, and therefore her arrest did not violate the Fourth Amendment,” Judge Thomas Ambro of the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the ruling obtained by the New Jersey Monitor.
Henry repeatedly told the marshals that she was not the person they were looking for and asked them to compare her fingerprints with those they had on file for the real perpetrator.
No one checked for two weeks, during which Henry was imprisoned in Newark and transferred to Pennsylvania.
There were about 30 other named law enforcement and government officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who were named as defendants in Henry’s now-dismissed lawsuit. This did not include the marshals involved in her arrest.
She charged them all with abuse of process, false arrest and imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, failure to train and supervise, and conspiracy.
Henry, who is a black Jamaican woman, tried to claim that alleged bias against her race and lower economic status led to her arrest, but Ambro also rejected this.
“We need not accept this bare conclusion, and she offers no other allegations to support it,” Ambro wrote.