By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh

A New Jersey woman paid a hefty price for sharing the same name with someone who skipped out on probation. As reported by the New York Post, Judith Maureen Henry from New Jersey, was arrested and spent two whole weeks in jail for someone else’s parole violation—then when she tried to sue, a judge threw out her case.

Henry had 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. After, things were finally squared up, Henry set out to sue the US marshals involved. A federal appellate judge ruled, however, that the officers are granted immunity from the Fourth Amendment, 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, as per the New Jersey Monitor. “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, concluding that marshals can only be responsible for “minimal burdens”.

The Fourth Amendment was set in place to protect people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and set the requirement for the issuing of warrants to establish reasonable cause for search or arrest. In 1982, with the decision of Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court offered some immunity defense to protect public officials and police officers from the many frivolous lawsuits which can result from their necessary actions.

According to The Post report, in Henry’s case the wrongful incarceration was connected to a woman with the same name who had pleaded guilty to drug possession back in the 1990, and who skipped out on her parole in Pennsylvania. Fast forward to 2019, this stranger’s past caught up with Henry and she wound up in Essex County jail in Newark. For two weeks officers didn’t look into verifying her identity or checking that her fingerprints match, and finally Henry was transferred to Pennsylvania.

The NJ woman sued the officials, naming some 30 law enforcement officers and government officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania as defendants in her lawsuit. 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, also alleged that bias against her race and lower economic status had led to her arrest. Judge Ambro tossed out the case altogether, also rejecting this complaint. “We need not accept this bare conclusion, and she offers no other allegations to support it,” Judge Ambro wrote.