I’ve lived in town for close to 30 years, and there have been several residents over the years with my name. According to the 11th circuit, that’s close enough for government work. If there’s a warrant for one of my doppelgangers, the Constitution allows them to scoop me up and detain me for 72 hours.
That’s what happened to David Sousa.
“IJ [The Institute for Justice] and several men named David Sosa are asking the Supreme Court to grant another David Sosa’s cert petition after the en banc Eleventh Circuit said the Constitution allows police to detain anyone for three days as long as there’s a warrant out for the arrest of anyone with the same name somewhere in the country.”
He wasn’t the David Sousa they were looking for, but he got detained anyway, and that’s a problem – from the petition.
This case is about the constitutionality of Florida police arresting and detaining David Sosa of Martin County, Florida, on a Texas warrant from 1992 for a man named David Sosa. To be clear, that’s not the David Sosa who chairs the philosophy department at the University of Texas.2 Nor is it the New York based songwriter David Sosa.
It’s also not the David Sosa who’s a cardiologist in Albuquerque,4 the one who works at the USDA, the law student at the University of Miami,6 or the David Sosa who owns a construction company in Winston-Salem. None of the David Sosas who submitted this brief are wanted in Texas, either. Two are from North Carolina and two from Los Angeles. Two of the amici David Sosas have even been confused for each other before! There are a lot of David Sosas in this
country—at least 924, if not more. Only one of them is suspected of selling crack cocaine in Harris County, Texas, back in the 1990s.
Okay, so there are a lot of David Sousa’s, and what about it? Why must the US Supreme Court get involved?
Ten of the 11 judges on the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Petitioner David Sosa has no legal recourse for police wrongfully arresting him twice based on the same blatant mistake of identity. Seven of those judges went much further and ruled that state officials do not even violate the Constitution if they hold an innocent person in jail for three days simply because that person shares a name with someone else in the country who has an outstanding warrant.
You don’t have to be David Sousa, just someone with the same name as someone else for whom the police have a warrant for arrest. The cops can show up, use force to arrest you, take you into custody, and detain you, and according to the 11th Circus, you have no recourse.
The writers in Hollywood will need to be careful not to add any dialogue about wrongful arrest for stories taking place in the jurisdiction of the 11th Circuit Court unless the Supremes managed to straighten the matter out.
I’d like to think a Court the same Hollywood writers would call conservative would see that, but there’s no guarantee.
