No One Should Be Jailed For Sharing A Name With A Suspected Criminal

Do you share a name with someone else in the U.S.? Soon after Google started making internet searches easy I discovered that there were at least a few people also named Andrew Wimer. Every once in a while, I get an email intended for someone else with my name but I’ve never suffered a serious mix-up.

David Sosa of Martin County, Florida cannot say the same. Sosa has been arrested twice, not because of anything he did, but because another David Sosa may have committed crimes decades ago.

In November 2014, Sosa was pulled over in a routine traffic stop. Instead of giving him a ticket and letting him going on his way, the officer told Sosa that there was a warrant for his arrest for a 1992 crime in Texas. Florida David Sosa didn’t match anything else in the description on the warrant: he had a different age, height, weight, social security number, and no tattoos.

The officer ignored everything else but the shared name and arrested Sosa. He was jailed for three hours, all the time pleading that they had the wrong man. He was finally finger-printed and released without charges being filed.

Four years later it was déjà vu all over again. Sosa was again pulled over in a routine stop and then arrested on the same old warrant. His objections about not matching anything else in the description were again ignored. But this time, the officers impounded his truck and threw him in jail for three days.

After he was released, David Sosa sued the Martin County Sheriff’s Office for violating his constitutional rights. In order to think that Florida David Sosa was the wanted man, the officers had to ignore all the other information in the warrant. That the same law enforcement agency did it twice in a few years demonstrates at the least incompetence and possibly malicious intent.

That case has had its ups and downs. A federal district court dismissed the suit, saying the officers didn’t violate his rights. An appeals court panel of three judges then reversed that decision and denied the officers’ request for qualified immunity. But the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took the rare step of having the panel’s decision reconsidered by the full court. A majority of the court sided with the district court, concluding that the officers should be immune and that in general police enjoy a three-day grace period before they must confirm someone’s identity.

The 11th Circuit covers the states of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama—approximately 36 million people. If this ruling holds up, anyone who shares the same name as a wanted criminal could find themselves in jail for three days for absolutely no reason and they would have no recourse after they got out.

The effects of being arrested, even if there are no charges pressed, can be devastating. For many it would mean losing a job. For someone with health challenges, it could mean three days without life-sustaining medication. Last year, Dexter Barry missed five doses of his heart transplant medication while held in a Jacksonville, Florida jail after a dispute with his neighbor. He died just three days after being released, with the pathologist concluding that his body rejected the heart transplant.

There are over 920 David Sosas in the U.S. Four men sharing this name recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Florida David Sosa’s case. Any of them reasonably believe that they could be arrested for a crime committed 25 years ago in Texas. Of course, there are even more common names than David Sosa. Chief Justice John Roberts shares the same name with an estimated 17,000 men in the U.S.

The Fourth Amendment was written to protect our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The amendment further requires that warrants must particularly describe the person to be seized. Police in Texas did their job when they issued a warrant for a David Sosa of a particular height, weight, birthdate and appearance. Martin County sheriff’s deputies violated the Fourth Amendment by using that warrant to seize a man who only shared the same name.

You should not have to wait three days until your constitutional rights kick in. David Sosa’s rights were violated the moment he was falsely arrested, and the hours and days he spent detained only add to the magnitude of the violation. If we want high quality law enforcement in this country, we can’t look the other way when officers blatantly ignore the Constitution.