A Black woman who was mistakenly arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, frisked, cavity searched, and forced to spend two weeks incarcerated in New Jersey and Pennsylvania was barred from suing six U.S. Marshals who detained her, a federal appeals court ruled last week.
Judith Maureen Henry, now 74, was arrested at her Newark home at 7 a.m. on Aug. 22, 2019, by U.S. Marshals and local law enforcement who had an arrest warrant for a woman of the same name who had skipped parole on a cocaine possession conviction in Pennsylvania 26 years earlier.
According to her lawsuit filed in 2020, Henry protested her innocence and denied she was the Judith Maureen Henry listed in the warrant, which had been sent to New Jersey officials by the parole board in Pennsylvania with identifying information that included Henry’s photo and her home address.
Henry was first hauled in to the Essex County Correctional Facility in New Jersey and detained for 10 days, then sent to two prisons in Pennsylvania for another four days. All the while, her complaint says, she tried to convince the marshals, sheriffs deputies, jail and prison officials to check her photo, fingerprints and date of birth against the criminal record of their true parolee target.
Law enforcement and corrections officials declined to do so until Sept. 3, when they discovered that Henry’s fingerprints did not match the absconder’s. It took another two days before she was finally released from the Pennsylvania women’s prison in Muncy, given $20 for food and a bus ticket to Newark’s Penn Station.
In the mean time, Henry claimed, she was not allowed to plead her case to a judge, was cavity searched while naked, and denied medications needed to manage her blood pressure and claustrophobia. She claimed she experienced increased anxiety, headaches, physical pain and shortness of breath as a result, and was also traumatized and humiliated.
Henry named 30 defendants in her lawsuit, amended in 2021, including Essex County, the Pennsylvania Interstate Parole Services, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, and dozens of law enforcement and corrections officers, including six deputy U.S. marshals.
Her complaint alleged abuse of process, false arrest and imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, failures to train and supervise, and conspiracy, citing violations of state and federal laws.
Last week, Judge Thomas Ambro, writing the opinion for a three-judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, dismissed the U.S. marshals from the case, reversing a district court decision.
Ambro ruled that the marshals had acted on a “constitutionally valid” warrant and were entitled to qualified immunity, a legal protection that insulates law enforcement officers from liability, the New Jersey Monitor reported.
“So 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,” Ambro wrote.
The judge noted that “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.”
Among them, he said: How strong must a claim of innocence announced after an arrest be before it must be investigated? Who should investigate – marshals or state law enforcement officers? How in-depth should that investigation be, and when should it happen?
“We grant that … a reasonable observer could conclude the answers are not hard to find and would impose minimal burdens on the Marshals,” he said, concluding that it is up to Congress, not the judiciary, to decide whether “potential encroachment on the executive branch’s investigatory function ‘is worth it.’”
In her claims of false arrest, false imprisonment, and conspiracy, Henry alleged that despite her protests of innocence, the arresting officers and jailers assumed she was guilty “merely because of her lower economic status” and that she was “a [B]lack woman from Jamaica.”
Ambro ruled that the marshals did not conspire to deprive her of equal protection under constitutional law, noting that a plaintiff “must show some racial, or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus [lay] behind conspirators’ action.” Despite Henry’s assertions that her treatment was a result of her economic status and race, “we need not accept this bare conclusion,” wrote Ambro, “and she offers no other allegations to support it.”
Henry’s lawsuit still has two dozen defendants in its sights, including individuals and institutions involved in her arrest and throughout her two-week incarceration. Her attorney Tisha Adams declined a request by Atlanta Black Star for comment on how she plans to continue the case.
The remaining defendants include Timothy Riegle, a parole staff technician at the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, whom Henry blamed for kicking off her legal nightmare by forwarding the warrant for her arrest to Essex County in New Jersey.
Henry alleges that Riegle performed a search for the name Judith Maureen Henry, and then selected her Newark address as the target for the arresting officers, attaching to the warrant her driver’s license photo.
Her complaint claims that supervisors at the Pennsylvania parole board improperly trained Riegle, who didn’t check the fingerprints of the parolee Judith Henry, perform a fingerprint comparison or request one from law enforcement. “Riegle did not take note of the physical characteristics, identifying scars, distinguishing marks and tattoos, the height difference between the fugitive and Ms. Henry, or the birth dates,” her complaint says.
Henry further alleges that this isn’t the first time she’s been mistaken for the same fugitive.
Her complaint faults Riegle for failing to contact a corrections officer, Don Young ,“who had information about Ms. Henry being previously arrested and misidentified as parolee in year 2000. Identifying marks on the body of the parolee sought [were] obtained during an arrest in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania,” the same location where a parole supervisor named as a defendant in the current case was located.
“Without reviewing physical descriptions, date of birth, FBI number, fingerprint card, and immigration detainer of the individual whom he initially sought to arrest, detain and extradite … Defendant Riegle failed to contact Don Young who had information about Ms. Henry and the individual he initially sought since the year 2000,” the complaint said.
Henry is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and legal fees, and a jury trial.
In their answer to her amended complaint in 2021, Essex County officials denied most of her allegations or claimed they did not have sufficient information to form a belief as to the truth or falsity of her claims. They asserted legal defenses to all of her claims, including qualified and absolute immunity, and contended they “acted in good faith and with reasonable and probable cause based on the then existing circumstances,” and “without malice,” and were “free of any and all negligence.”
