A federal jury found last week that a Black transgender woman who was wrongly arrested in 2015 in Atlanta on bogus cocaine charges and jailed for more than five months is due $1.5 million.
Judge William Ray II said on Thursday, two days after the jury’s verdict, that Ju’Zema Goldring, who was arrested by two Atlanta police officers, deserved “some semblance of justice” for what occurred.
The officers, Vladimir Henry and Juan Restrepo, had sliced open her stress ball and claimed to have found cocaine inside, when, in fact, it was only “the interior contents of a stress ball,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in 2018.
“She spent nearly six months in the Fulton County Jail based on this seemingly bogus charge,” Judge Ray wrote in his ruling.
Miguel A. Dominguez, one of Ms. Goldring’s lawyers, said in an interview on Tuesday that “this whole ordeal has had a tremendous negative impact on her life,” and that she had struggled with nightmares and mental health issues after “being locked up as an innocent person for 23 hours a day.”
Michael Smith, a spokesman for the City of Atlanta, declined to comment on Tuesday. Steve Avery, a spokesman for the Atlanta Police Department, said Officers Henry and Restrepo, the defendants in the lawsuit, were still employed and on duty; he declined to comment further on the case.
Calls to phone numbers listed as belonging to the officers were not immediately returned on...
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