Trans woman awarded $1.5 million for bogus drug arrest
Ju'Zema Goldring spent five months in jail after being falsely accused of smuggling cocaine inside a "stress ball" in her purse.
A federal grand jury has awarded $1.5 million to a transgender woman from Atlanta who was incarcerated for more than five months due to a bogus drug charge against her.
Ju’Zema Goldring was walking with friends in Midtown Atlanta on Oct. 11, 2015, when she was charged with jaywalking — an offense she claims she didn’t commit — and searched by two police officers, Vladimir Henry and Juan Restrepo.
Upon searching Goldring, the officers found a “stress ball” in her purse and cut it open over suspicion that she might be smuggling drugs in it.
According to a lawsuit filed by Goldring in 2018, Henry tested a substance inside the ball for narcotics, but despite two field tests showing no evidence of illegal drugs, decided to detain Goldring and charged her with trafficking cocaine.
According to Goldring’s lawyer, Miguel Dominguez, she was unable to pay the $25,000 bail, and therefore was left in jail for more than five months, eventually being released on March 22, 2016 after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted its own independent test, which failed to detect cocaine.
Two years later, Goldring sued the Atlanta Police Department, as well Henry and Restrepo — both of whom are still employed by the department, according to the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council — for wrongful arrest.
The case went to trial earlier this month, with the jury finding that Henry was “liable for malicious prosecution” and awarding $1.5 million in compensatory damages to Goldring.
Jeff Filipovits, another of Goldring’s attorneys, said that Henry never should have charged Goldring with a crime, given that both field tests performed by the officers were negative for drugs. To bolster their claims, Goldring’s attorneys had conducted field tests in front of a jury at the trial.
“Everyone on the jury saw that the test was negative,” Filipovits told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an emailed statement. “It should not have taken seven years and a federal jury trial to bring this to light. It’s terrifying to think what other abuses the City of Atlanta has tolerated that haven’t gotten our attention. Our client was obviously profiled, as are so many others.”
Goldring’s attorneys had argued in court that the arresting officers violated the department’s Transgender Interaction policy, adopted in 2014, which instructs officers to use a transgender individual’s name and correct pronouns during interactions and to treat them “in a manner appropriate to the individual’s gender identity.”
In a written judgment last week, Judge William Ray, of the Northern District of Georgia’s Atlanta Division, said the cases highlighted two “injustices” at the hands of the department — the use of jaywalking charges as a pretext for charging people with other crimes and the existence of a point system that might coerce officers into issuing citations or making arrests in order to earn a certain number of “points” and avoid negative performance reviews from supervisors.
“[D]ifferent witnesses at trial testified that APD officers sometimes arrest individuals — actually arrest them, not just write them a citation — for jaywalking. In fact, Defendant Henry testified that, when he was an officer, he arrested everyone he saw jaywalking. Everyone. While the Court recognizes that jaywalking is a crime and that officers have discretion when to make arrests, the Court is nonetheless troubled by this practice,” Ray wrote.
“For one thing, any arrest, even for a low-level offense likejaywalking, can seriously disrupt a person’s life, including by making it harder for him or her to obtain employment. Beyond that, the time it takes for an officer to arrest someone for jaywalking arguably could be better spent on more pressing activities, such as addressing violent crimes which seem so prevalent in recent times or with engaging with the community,” Ray continued.
“Finally, the Court worries that allowing officers to selectively arrest some people for the common practice of jaywalking may also allow officers to arrest some people as a pretext for discrimination.”
Dominguez called the ruling in favor of his client a “small but significant victory on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized people here in Atlanta, who have been suffering through discriminatory and callous policing by individuals who swear to protect and serve their communities, but who under the cover of darkness, are indifferent to the consequences of their discriminatory practices on the most vulnerable amongst us.”
A spokesperson for Mayor Andre Dickens, who took office last month, told Atlanta FOX affiliate WAGA-TV that because the judgment was issued against an individual officer, the city had not been ordered to pay Goldring any amount of damages. But a spokesperson for the city reportedly told the Journal-Constitution that the matter was “an ongoing legal matter,” and that the city “is reviewing the order and the officer’s options.”
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