A New Jersey woman was held in jail for two weeks after police mistakenly identified her as a criminal suspect. Though she’s been freed, she just received even more bad news in regards to the aftermath of the mess.
Ms. Judith Maureen Henry’s only crime was sharing the name of a woman who was an actual suspect. In 2019, authorities with the Pennsylvania Interstate Parole Services issued a warrant for her arrest, per NJ.com. The warrant cited a parole violation on drug-related charges. About 12 police cars plus the U.S. Marshals pulled up to Henry’s home in Newark, Nj. with guns drawn to place her under arrest, according to a lawsuit she filed in 2020.
Despite her pleas insisting they had the wrong woman and with seemingly no further investigation, they dragged her to Essex County Correctional Facility.
It wasn’t until she was placed behind bars and fingerprinted four times that authorities compared her information to that of the suspect they really sought: a woman who pleaded guilty to drug possession in 1993 and skipped parole, per her lawsuit.
It took days for the police to put two and two together before Henry was finally released. However, a ruling announced last week, a judge pummeled her mission to hold the cops accountable for their sloppy mistake.
Read more from The New Jersey Monitor:
A three-judge appellate panel ruled Thursday that the marshals who hauled Judith Maureen Henry to the Essex County Correctional Facility in 2019 acted on a “constitutionally valid” warrant and were entitled to qualified immunity, a legal protection that insulates law enforcement officers 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,” wrote Judge Thomas Ambro of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
“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.
Henry’s lawsuit claimed she was treated unfairly because she was a low-income Black woman from Jamaica. She also claimed that as a result of the two-week detainment she suffered from claustrophobia, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
However, the 30 defendants she named in the suit including six deputy U.S. Marshals and several state officials may not feel the wrath of legal accountability. It’s unclear if she plans to seek other legal avenues.
