Ty‘Ran Dixon, a former professional football player, was returning from an international flight when his nightmare began. Officers accused him of being involved in a shooting in Barnwell County, South Carolina—a place Dixon had never visited.
But the man involved with that shooting was Tyren Dickson. Their names were spelled differently, and the two men looked nothing alike; Dickson was far smaller than the football player. But the police arrested Dixon and he spent 67 days in five different jails. Only after Dixon’s extended detention did Barnwell officials admit their mistake.
A simple check of Dixon’s ID should have cleared him. Instead, officers failed to take the time to verify they had the right suspect, stealing away months of an innocent man’s life. Now Dixon is suing to seek justice for his wrongful detention.
Dixon’s nightmare was not the first time an innocent person was jailed for someone else’s crimes, and it certainly will not be the last. Across the country, countless individuals have had to endure similar struggles to Dixon’s, all thanks to careless policing.
Take Penny McCarthy, a woman in Arizona who was arrested when U.S. Marshals confused her with a different woman—a woman named Carole Rozak—who had failed to meet with her parole officer 25 years earlier. Penny pleaded with the Marshals holding her at gunpoint that they had the wrong woman, but they did not listen, did not check her ID, and still jailed her. After a long night in a cold cell, Penny was released with court-ordered weekly check-ins until the United States quietly admitted that she was not the woman they were looking for. The trauma of her wrongful detention was so severe that Penny left Arizona altogether and still fears that police will imprison her again.
Penny McCarthy teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to hold federal officials accountable for their life-altering error.
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment guarantees due process for deprivations of a person’s liberty. Locking up the wrong person because police failed to confirm their identity violates both rights.
To promote accountability for wrongful acts by federal employees, Congress enacted the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and later reformed it to allow claims such as false arrest. But the FTCA is rife with exceptions to liability and procedural hurdles to accountability. At the same time, the Supreme Court in recent years has made it more and more difficult to hold federal officers accountable for violating constitutional rights by suing them directly under the constitutional provisions they violate. IJ is fighting to pry open the avenues to enforce constitutional rights in court.
Earlier this year, IJ won a unanimous Supreme Court decision in Martin v. United States, where an Atlanta family’s home was wrongly raided by an FBI SWAT team. Lower courts had dismissed their FTCA claim, but IJ secured their right to be heard in court.
Penny’s and Dixon’s cases are part of that same fight. Mistaken-identity arrests are not rare accidents. They happen because the absence of reliable accountability measures fosters abuses of power and carelessness when it comes to people’s constitutional rights. One of IJ’s missions is to ensure the Constitution’s protections are enforceable, so that when the government fails, it answers for its mistakes.
Tell Us About Your Case
The Institute for Justice is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public interest law firm. Our mission is to end widespread abuses of government power and secure the constitutional rights that allow all Americans to pursue their dreams. In addition to representing Penny McCarthy, IJ represents other innocent people injured by government officers who wrongly detained them or wrongly destroyed their property. For example, Jennifer Heath Box was detained by local officers in Florida who inexcusably mistook her for a much younger person who shared part of her name. On Wednesday, a federal court ruled the officers who arrested and jailed Jennifer for three days were not entitled to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields government officials from accountability when they violate people’s right, unless those rights are “clearly established.” George Retes was detained in California for three days and three nights by federal officers who had no basis to hold him. Amy Hadley’s home in Indiana was damaged by police officers because they mistook her home for the place where a suspect was posting on Facebook, though he had never been there. Likewise, Alisa Carr and Avery Marshall’s home was damaged by officers who mistook their home for the location of a suspect who had never been there. If you feel the government has abused your constitutional rights, tell us about your case. Visit https://staging.ij.org/report-abuse/.
About the Institute for Justice
Through strategic litigation, training, communication, activism, legislative outreach and research, the Institute for Justice advances a rule of law under which individuals can control their destinies as free and responsible members of society. IJ litigates to secure economic liberty, educational choice, private property rights, freedom of speech and other vital individual liberties, and to restore constitutional limits on the power of government.