Recently a news is going viral, in which a New Jersey woman was mistakenly arrested and sent to jail for two weeks. A federal appeals court has exonerated those responsible for the woman’s wrongful imprisonment and ruled that she cannot sue for wrongdoing.
NJ woman mistakenly arrested, jailed for two weeks can’t sue over error https://t.co/qtzAPV6ycL pic.twitter.com/fMDo1wjoLF
— New York Post (@nypost) September 2, 2024
NJ woman mistakenly arrested, jailed for two weeks can’t sue over error https://t.co/AL6htFlKww pic.twitter.com/XSpJATJZrp
— New York Post Metro (@nypmetro) September 2, 2024
Judith Maureen Henry, a New Jersey native, found herself in an unexpected legal predicament due to a mix-up with another woman who had a criminal past. This other Judith, who had been involved in drug possession and parole violations in Pennsylvania during the 1990s, unwittingly cast a shadow on Henry’s life. In 2019, this case of mistaken identity led Henry to face legal troubles of her own, resulting in her incarceration in Essex County jail in Newark.
Henry took action to sue the U.S. Marshals involved for the mistaken arrest, but could not because the Fourth Amendment granted them immunity, a legal protection that protects 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 to match her fingerprints to those on file for the real culprit. But no one investigated it, due to which Henry had to stay in Newark jail and was later transferred to Pennsylvania.
Read Also:- 23 Years old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin found dead in Gaza