NJ woman mistakenly arrested, jailed for two weeks can’t sue over error

A New Jersey woman served two weeks of someone else’s parole violation — and those responsible for her wrongful incarceration are apparently constitutionally protected from blame, a federal appellate court ruled. 

Judith Maureen Henry, hailing from New Jersey, shares her name with another woman who pleaded guilty to drug possession and skipped out on her parole in Pennsylvania during the 1990s. In 2019, this stranger’s past caught up with Henry instead and landed her in Essex County jail in Newark. 

Henry set out to sue the US marshals involved, but can’t, as the Fourth Amendment granted them qualified immunity, a legal protection that shields 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,” 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 the ones they had on file for the real offender. 

No one checked for two weeks, during which Henry was jailed in Newark and transferred to Pennsylvania. 

There were about 30 other named law enforcement officers and government officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania named as defendants in Henry’s now-discarded lawsuit. This did not include the marshals involved in her arrest. 

She accused them all of abuse of process, false arrest and imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, failures to train and supervise, and conspiracy. 

Henry, who is a black Jamaican woman, tried to argue that alleged bias against her race and lower economic status led to her arrest, but Ambro rejected this as well. 

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