Wrongful Felony Drug Charge Leads To $1.5M Judgement Against 2 Atlanta Police Officers

ATLANTA, GA — A federal jury awarded a homeless transgender woman $1.5 million in a lawsuit against two Atlanta Police officers who wrongly charged her with felony drug possession.

Ju’Zema Marie Goldring was arrested in Midtown in October 2015 for jaywalking. The lawsuit said officers Vladimir Henry and Juan Restrepo arrested Goldring for the low-level charge because she was transgender and homeless. The two officers searched her purse and found a stress ball, they cut it open and said, after two negative field narcotics tests, that the stuffing material found inside was cocaine.

It wasn’t. Still, they charged Goldring with felony drug possession with intent to distribute. She remained in the Fulton County Jail — where she was beaten up and sustained a head injury — until March 2016 after the Georgia Bureau of Investigations determined that no drugs were found in the confiscated stress ball, according to court records.

“The plaintiff was arrested and falsely charged with drug trafficking due to the officer’s intentional misrepresentation or reckless interpretation of a drug test on a substance found in a ‘stress ball’ in the plaintiff’s purse,” United States District Judge William Ray II said in his scathing written judgment obtained by Patch. “She spent nearly six months in the Fulton County Jail based on this seemingly bogus charge.”

During the trial last week at the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta, witnesses testified that Atlanta Police officers sometimes arrest people for jaywalking, and Henry actually testified that he always arrested jaywalkers, according to court records.

In his judgment, Ray said the officers’ time could have been better spent addressing more serious crimes, rather than cherry-picking arrest subjects based on undisclosed criteria.

“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,” the judge wrote. “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.”

A member of the APD command staff took to the witness stand to testify that officers must earn a certain number of points each day for executing different procedures like writing citations or making arrests, with arrests earning more points, according to court files.

Ray disapproved of the practice in his judgment.

“The Court hopes the APD and the City of Atlanta might consider reforming these practices,” he wrote. “The Court has great respect for law enforcement and does not mean to imply otherwise here, but it would seem such reforms could garner the APD even greater respect from the community that it serves.”

Both Restrepo and Henry remain employed by the Atlanta Police Department, a spokesman confirmed.