Round 6 a.m. on Christmas Eve in 2022, Jennifer Heath Field had simply returned from a six-day Caribbean cruise when she was confronted by Broward County sheriff’s deputies at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. They arrested her based mostly on a warrant for a distinct lady, Jennifer Delcarmen Heath, who was needed on little one endangerment costs.
Though Heath Field and the suspect had been each white ladies from Texas and had related names, there have been a number of notable variations. Heath Field lived in Richmond, whereas the suspect’s final identified tackle was in Houston. They’d totally different driver’s license numbers, Social Safety numbers, and tattoos. Heath Field had purple hair, blue-gray eyes, and a good complexion, whereas the suspect had black hair, brown eyes, and a medium complexion. Heath Field was 5 inches taller than the suspect and almost 23 years older. For sure, their fingerprints didn’t match.
Regardless of these apparent, readily ascertainable variations, Heath Field spent three days, together with Christmas, in jail earlier than the Broward Sheriff’s Workplace (BSO) lastly acknowledged that it had the improper lady. That egregious mistake was “not affordable,” a federal decide dominated this week in an order that enables Heath Field to proceed with the civil rights lawsuit that she filed final yr towards Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony and 5 of his workplace’s staff. U.S. District Decide Melissa Damian additionally rejected the deputies’ declare that they had been shielded by certified immunity, a doctrine that bars federal civil rights claims until they allege violations of “clearly established” legislation.
“There have been quite a few discrepancies between the Suspect’s data and the Plaintiff’s,” Damian writes, and the deputies “had loads of time to determine their mistake.” That window of alternative prolonged past the three days of Heath Field’s detention, for the reason that BSO first recognized her as a fugitive when she left for her cruise, six days earlier than her arrest.
Damian’s resolution “makes it clear that when police overlook apparent proof that they are arresting the improper particular person, they’re going to be held accountable,” says Jared McClain, one of many Institute for Justice attorneys who’re representing Heath Field in her lawsuit. “Anybody who checked out Jennifer ought to have been capable of inform she was not the particular person police needed.”
Throughout her detention, Damian notes, Heath Field “skilled what’s more-or-less typical of any particular person arrested and detained in jail, together with physique cavity searches, publicity to violence and unceasing loud noises that made sleep unattainable, interactions with condescending and uncaring guards (who, female and male, additionally watched her bathe), [and] enduring unbearably chilly temperatures.” In the meantime, Heath Field, her husband, and her brother (who had accompanied the couple on the cruise, alongside together with his spouse and kids) repeatedly urged her jailers to train a modicum of due diligence by verifying that she was not the girl described within the warrant.
“When the arresting deputies detained Plaintiff, she gave them her passport and driver’s license, and people deputies handed a replica of the warrant to one another to assessment the non-public data of the Suspect recognized within the warrant,” Damian notes. Deputy Peter Peraza and Deputy Monica Jean “had been current on the arrest, and so they tried to settle Plaintiff’s and her husband’s protests by assuring them that Plaintiff’s determine could be verified.” However the deputies “by no means verified that Plaintiff was the Suspect.”
Whereas Heath Field was behind Peraza’s car, Damian says in her abstract of the details alleged by the lawsuit, the deputy “sat at his pc and requested for Plaintiff’s full identify and eye colour, presumably to establish in the event that they matched the Suspect’s; he even remarked that Plaintiff had truthful pores and skin (not medium-toned, just like the Suspect) however continued to disregard the mounting proof that Plaintiff was not the Suspect.” Whereas driving Heath Field to jail, Peraza “instructed her that the warrant matched her date of start and married identify (Field), which was unfaithful.”
After Heath Field arrived on the Broward County Jail, the reserving officer, Deputy Jasmine Hines, “scanned [her] driver’s license and knowledgeable Deputy Peraza that there was no warrant for her arrest of their system.” Heath Field alleges that Peraza however persuaded Hines that they’d the fitting particular person “as a result of their names had been related and the Suspect’s mugshot appeared to seem like Plaintiff.” However Peraza’s arrest affidavit included data contradicting that declare, together with Heath Field’s tackle, age, peak, eye colour, and pores and skin tone.
Heath Field was fingerprinted throughout reserving, and her fingerprints didn’t match the suspect’s. The sheriff’s workplace “would have identified” that, Damian notes, “if it required its officers to make use of fingerprints to substantiate that an arrestee is certainly the suspect recognized on a warrant.”
Throughout Heath Field’s reserving, her husband and brother “labored tirelessly to persuade anybody at BSO to confirm [her] identification,” Damian writes. After Christmas, they employed a Texas lawyer who discovered from a deputy in Harris County that Heath Field and the suspect had totally different start dates and FBI numbers (that are assigned every time somebody’s fingerprints are submitted to the company, corresponding to when a background test is performed). The Harris County deputy additionally found that somebody on the Houston Police Division had mistakenly connected Heath Field’s driver’s license photograph to the suspect’s arrest warrant.
Armed with that data, Heath Field’s brother and the lawyer “began calling Harris County and Broward County legislation enforcement to attempt to appropriate the error.” They finally reached Deputy Anthony Thorpe, who was in command of Central Consumption on the Broward County Jail. Thorpe allegedly “insisted that he couldn’t do something as a result of it was Plaintiff’s duty to alert BSO of the difficulty.” Heath Field’s brother then contacted officers in Harris County, who mentioned the BSO wanted to ship them the warrant and Heath Field’s fingerprints so they might do a comparability.
The lawsuit alleges that Thorpe initially refused to try this. However “after a couple of dozen telephone calls” from Heath Field’s brother (who “occurs to be a legislation enforcement
officer in Georgia,” Damian notes), Thorpe “lastly agreed to contact Harris County someday on December 26.”
That very same day, “a male guard knowledgeable Plaintiff that BSO knew she was not the Suspect however that, regardless of BSO’s mistake, the one manner for her to go free was for Harris County officers to return get her or for the right Suspect to be arrested.” That evening, Heath Field “went to the jail kiosk and filed a grievance, requesting that BSO examine her fingerprints to the Suspect’s fingerprints.” The following morning, the BSO lastly launched Heath Field.
“When she was launched,” in line with the lawsuit, “BSO personnel merely instructed her, ‘It occurs.'” An investigation by the BSO’s Inner Affairs Division “confirmed that the officers adopted BSO protocols and didn’t violate any BSO insurance policies or practices after they detained Jennifer for over 75 hours with out confirming that she was the topic of an impressive warrant.”
After Heath Field filed her lawsuit, the deputies argued that they’d not violated her Fourth Modification rights as a result of they’d made a “affordable” mistake. Not so, Damian says after contemplating the related case legislation within the eleventh Circuit, which incorporates Florida. Even in instances the place police had much less data indicating that they’d arrested the improper particular person, she notes, district courts and the U.S. Court docket of Appeals for the eleventh Circuit have allowed unreasonable seizure claims. And on this case, she says, there was a “mountain of proof” indicating that Heath Field was not the suspect.
The deputies additionally argued that, even when they’d violated Heath Field’s Fourth Modification rights, they’d no manner of understanding that. However eleventh Circuit case legislation “offers a number of materially related choices that would offer the Deputies a good warning that their conduct was illegal,” Damian writes. As a result of these choices “put them on discover of the unlawfulness of their conduct,” she says, they don’t seem to be entitled to certified immunity.
Damian additionally discovered that Heath Field had plausibly alleged that Sheriff Tony could possibly be held accountable for “insufficient insurance policies, practices, and customs that precipitated the violation of her constitutional rights.” The lawsuit cites 5 particular failures: “(1) officers should not required to cross reference reserving paperwork towards the arrest warrant to make sure the right particular person is booked into jail; (2) officers who take fingerprints of arrestees should not required to confirm these fingerprints towards the person on a warrant; (3) officers should not required to take any extra steps to confirm an arrestee’s identification when an officer has cause to consider the arrestee is just not the topic on the warrant; (4) officers should not required to cease the reserving course of when an arrestee’s figuring out data doesn’t match the knowledge on a warrant; and (5) officers should not required to tell an individual purporting to be the sufferer of mistaken identification how they’ll report BSO’s mistake.”
The lawsuit highlights two prior mistaken arrests by the BSO that Heath Field says ought to have alerted Tony to the necessity for such safeguards. In 2010, Damian notes, the BSO “arrested Paola Londono as she disembarked from a cruise ship pursuant to a warrant for a distinct one who was seven years older and 5 inches shorter.” And in January 2022, 11 months earlier than Heath Field’s ordeal, the BSO “booked a person named Leonardo Silva Oliveria pursuant to an arrest warrant, even supposing he was a distinct age and had totally different bodily traits, corresponding to weight and tattoos, from these of the fugitive.” Londono and Oliviera had been mistakenly jailed for 2 and 5 days, respectively.
“These two examples are ample to get Plaintiff over the hurdle of exhibiting prior,
related incidents,” Damian says. She provides that the conclusions of the BSO’s inside investigators, who discovered that the deputies had adopted BSO protocols and had not violated any related insurance policies, bolsters “the inference that the Sheriff had discover of the improper police conduct (right here, arresting the improper particular person regardless of obtrusive purple flags indicating a case of mistaken identification) and did not take remedial motion.”
The BSO’s preliminary mistake in figuring out Heath Field as a fugitive could be comprehensible given the similarity in names and the photograph of Heath Field that Houston police erroneously connected to the warrant. However the BSO’s failure to appropriate that mistake throughout the six days that Heath Field was on the cruise, on the time of her arrest, when she was booked, or throughout her three days of detention can solely be defined by a mixture of vanity, incompetence, and indifference.
“This entire expertise has been traumatizing, so I am very joyful that my lawsuit can transfer ahead and I can lastly search justice for what occurred to me,” Heath Field says. “After I was in jail, no person would take heed to me that they’d arrested the improper particular person, and now it seems like any individual is lastly listening.”
