TSA officers meet you at the counter, escort you to a room and tell you to wait. Then, they tell you that you're under arrest on a Texas fugitive warrant.
"But I've never been to Texas!"
They pay no attention to your protests and handcuff you to a chair. Minutes later, police arrive and take you to jail, where you stay for almost 2 weeks until your family and the lawyers they hired get you out.
It happened to Bethany Farber at the Los Angeles International Airport. Now, she's suing Los Angeles.
"I just kept insisting that they check," Farber said, "that they double-check because they had the wrong person, and I made that very clear. I told them over and over again, and they just completely blew me off."
Her lawsuit alleges that she was kept unsanitary conditions and saw feces being thrown and smeared on walls. Her lawyer, Rodney Diggs, said she "had to spend her nights in a cold jail cell, listening to voices of other inmates screaming, crying, she saw fights within her cell, she saw fights in the common areas of the jail."
According to Diggs, the Los Angeles Police Department failed to check her birth date, her social security number, her fingerprints, her middle name, or compare her features with a photo of the actual fugitive.
Meanwhile, her family hired lawyers in both Texas and California. The lawsuit alleges that after about 11 days, the Los Angeles authorities received notice from Texas that they were holding the wrong person but still kept her locked up another 3 days.
Finally, the family managed to convince the authorities to release Farber by using her cellphone's GPS records to prove she wasn't in Texas at the time of the crime. Farber praised her family: "They were fighting for me every day." But what would have happened if Farber's family had not worked tirelessly and hired attorneys in two states?
"There's a lot of people out there who this is happening to who don't have anyone advocating for them," Farber said. "They don't have their family fighting for them every day, and every day that they're in jail, wrongfully, their lives are being dismantled."
When asked about the matter, the LAPD answered that it does not comment on pending litigation.
However, Farber had something more to say: "It could happen to anyone."
In November 1014, a deputy sheriff in Martin County, Florida stopped David Sosa and checked his driver's license. According to the database, a county in Texas had issued an arrest warrant for a David Sosa.
The deputy took Sosa into custody. Sosa spent several hours at the sheriff's department before the officers confirmed that he wasn't the man Texas wanted. They released him.
In April 2018, the same thing happened. Sosa protested that the deputies had made this mistake three years earlier. However, a jail employee told him they had no records of the previous arrest. Noneless, he spent 3 days in jail before being released.
How long would they keep him in jail the next time. To foreclose that possibility, Sosa sued the sheriff's department in federal court. The lawsuit alleged false arrest and overdetention. It also alleged that the sheriff's department had failed to train the deputies and had failed to keep adequate records.
The district court dismissed the lawsuit based on the doctrine of qualified immunity. Sosa appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. In September 2021, a three-judge panel affirmed the District Court's dismissal of the allegations of false arrest and failure to train and keep records. However, the Court held that the doctrine of qualified immunity did not bar Sosa's overdetention claim.
But that partial victory may be short-lived. In January of this year, the entire court voted to vacate the panel's decision. The case will now be decided by the full court.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We welcome your comments, but please make them civil and relevant. Thanks!