New Jersey woman arrested, jailed over mistaken identity cannot sue due to qualified immunity, court rules

A New Jersey woman who was arrested and spent two weeks behind bars over a 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 booked into the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark in 2019 after the marshals detained her, mistakenly believing she was another woman with the same name who pleaded guilty to drug possession and skipped her parole in Pennsylvania in 1993.

Henry sought to sue the marshals over the mistake, but a three-judge appellate panel ruled Thursday that the marshals acted on a "constitutionally valid" warrant and were protected by qualified immunity, which shields law enforcement from liability for wrongdoing.

"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 U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the ruling, according to the New Jersey Monitor.

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Henry repeatedly told marshals during her 2019 arrest that she was not the person they were after and asked them to compare her fingerprints to those of the actual offender. But nobody 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 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," Ambro wrote.

The judge said those questions include how strong a claim of innocence must be before a marshal investigates, who should investigate and how thorough an investigation should be conducted. He said a reasonable observer could conclude the answers to these questions would be easy to find and would impose "minimal burdens" on the marshals.

But, Ambro wrote, those policy questions should be up to lawmakers to address.

He also noted that the marshals were not involved in Henry's continued detention.

The court also rejected allegations from Henry, who is black and from Jamaica, that she faced this treatment due to her race, sex, national origin and lower economic status.

"We need not accept this bare conclusion, and she offers no other allegations to support it," Ambro wrote.

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A district judge had refused the marshals' request to dismiss Henry’s lawsuit against them, but Ambro reversed that ruling and ordered the judge to drop the marshals from the lawsuit.

Outside the marshals, Henry's lawsuit named Essex County and about 30 law enforcement officers and government officials in 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.