A New Jersey woman who was wrongfully arrested and jailed due to a mistaken identity cannot sue for damages, according to a court ruling.

A court ruled that a New Jersey woman who was arrested and spent two weeks in jail due to a mistaken identity cannot sue the U.S. marshals who arrested her because they are shielded by qualified immunity.

In 2019, Judith Maureen Henry was wrongfully imprisoned in the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark due to a misunderstanding by the marshals, who believed she was someone else with the same name who had committed a drug possession offense and violated parole in Pennsylvania in 1993.

A three-judge appellate panel ruled Thursday that the marshals were protected by qualified immunity and acted on a "constitutionally valid" warrant, preventing Henry from suing them over the mistake.

According to the New Jersey Monitor, Judge Thomas Ambro of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the arrest of Henry was reasonable due to the information attached to the warrant, and therefore her arrest did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

Despite Henry's repeated requests to compare her fingerprints to those of the actual offender during her 2019 arrest, nobody did so until 10 days after her arrest, when she was transferred to Pennsylvania. She remained locked up for a few more days before being finally released.

Ambro wrote that the Marshals Service's failure to take Henry's claims of innocence seriously raises policy questions about their role after apprehending a suspect on a warrant for a crime they did not investigate.

The judge stated that the questions regarding the strength of an innocence claim, the investigator, and the thoroughness of the investigation could be easily determined and would have minimal impact on the marshals.

Lawmakers should address the policy questions, according to Ambro.

Henry's continued detention did not involve the marshals.

The court also rejected allegations from Henry, a black man from Jamaica, that he faced this treatment due to his race, sex, national origin, and lower economic status.

Ambro wrote that we should not accept this conclusion without evidence, and she did not provide any additional allegations to support it.

A district judge had initially refused to dismiss Henry's lawsuit against the marshals, but Ambro later reversed that decision and ordered the judge to exclude the marshals from the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit outside the marshals, Henry accused Essex County and approximately 30 law enforcement officers and government officials in New Jersey and Pennsylvania of wrongdoing, including abuse of process, false arrest and imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, failure to train and supervise, and conspiracy.