A police officer had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring. But the officer, Heather Weyker, cannot be sued, because a court ruled in July that she was acting under color of federal law.
For years, Weyker, an officer in St. Paul,
Minnesota, gathered evidence, cultivated witnesses, and testified under oath in connection with an interstate sex-trafficking ring run by Somali refugees. She did all that while allegedly fabricating the very ring she was investigating. Her efforts resulted in 30 indictments, nine trials, and exactly zero convictions.
In 2011, Hamdi Mohamud, then just 16 years old, found herself arrested after a woman named Muna Abdulkadir attacked her and her friends at knifepoint. Inconveniently for Mohamud, Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s bogus investigation.
After a call from Abdulkadir—during which she reportedly informed Weyker she had carried out a knife attack and was worried her arrest was imminent—Weyker advised other members of law enforcement
that Abdulkadir was a federal witness. She had information and documentation, Weyker noted, that Mohamud and her friends were out to intimidate Abdulkadir.
“The first part was true, but everything else Weyker said was false,” summarized
Judge David Stras for the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 8th Circuit. “There was no ‘information’ or ‘documentation’ that anyone was trying to intimidate Abdulkadir. Nevertheless, based on what Weyker told him, Officer [Anthijuan] Beeks arrested Mohamud and the others for witness tampering.”
The government would dismiss those trumped-up charges, but only after Mohamud spent 25 months in custody.
Mohamud sued—and succeeded. A federal court in 2018 declined to give Weyker qualified immunity, finding it was already clearly established at the time of her arrest that Weyker’s alleged misconduct violated the Fourth Amendment.
Two years later, however, Mohamud’s luck soured on appeal. Though the 8th Circuit conceded that Weyker’s sex-trafficking investigation was “plagued with problems from the start” (the trial judge found, for example, that she fabricated information and lied multiple times under oath), the court said she was, in fact, immune.
That wasn’t because she was entitled to qualified immunity. Rather, although Weyker was a St. Paul police officer, she had been cross-deputized on a federal task force to carry out the investigation. That gave her the legal protections afforded to federal law enforcement—a much higher bar for alleged victims to clear.
Lawsuits against federal employees are subject to the Bivens doctrine. Named after the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the ruling allowed a man to sue the federal agents who conducted a warrantless raid on his home and then strip-searched him at a courthouse.
But the Supreme Court has made it almost cartoonishly difficult for plaintiffs to make use of their very good decision. In 2017, the Court ruled in Ziglar v. Abbasi that Bivens claims against federal agents can survive only if they clear a two-pronged test.
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