Police arrested the wrong David Sosa twice; we David Sosas want SCOTUS to hear his case
“It could’ve been me.”
That’s what each of us thought when we learned that an innocent man was arrested twice, simply because he had the same name as someone with an outstanding warrant: David Sosa.
After all, both of us also share that name.
When we learned about this case of mistaken identity, and about our namesake’s attempt to hold the police who put him through this accountable, we had to get involved. Alongside the Institute for Justice and two other men named David Sosa, we filed an amicus brief urging the United States Supreme Court to hear this important case.
The case started in November 2014, when the innocent David Sosa was pulled over in Martin County, Florida. During the routine traffic stop, the officer ran his license and realized there was an arrest warrant for a David Sosa who has been wanted in Texas since 1992.
The officer overlooked all the signs that should have made it obvious that this was the wrong David Sosa. The innocent David Sosa had no tattoos, whereas the wanted David Sosa had tattoos. The two also had different heights, different weights, different dates of birth, and different social security numbers.
The Martin County officer arrested the innocent David Sosa anyway and detained him for three hours. After multiple explanations to his jailers that they had the wrong man, they finally fingerprinted him and released him.
As if one arrest based on mistaken identity wasn’t bad enough, it happened again four years later. Once again, it was the Martin County Sherriff’s Office, executing the same warrant.
This time, the innocent Sosa knew what was happening. He laid out all the proof he had that he was not the same David Sosa who had committed the 1992 crime in Texas. He told officers that he had already been stopped before and that none of his information matched the description of the suspect.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the police from going even further this time. The officer arrested Sosa, impounded his truck, and kept him in jail for three days.
After he was finally released, the innocent Sosa rightly felt like his rights had been violated — any of us would have — so he sued the officers. Initially, Sosa was able to overcome the officers’ claim that they were entitled to qualified immunity, a judge-made doctrine that shields government officials from civil liability when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, unless that right is “clearly established.”
Unfortunately, the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed Sosa’s case and ruled that he had “no claim” whatsoever against the officers. Under that logic, any one of us could be jailed simply based on the fact that we have the same name as a man who’s been wanted in Texas since the 1990s, and we would have no way to hold the officers who arrested us accountable.
We think that’s absurd. It flies in the face of everything we’re taught about justice in America. Simply put, nobody should be arrested just because he has the same name as a suspected criminal.
Police have all the tools at their fingertips to verify someone’s identity. There must be a way to hold law enforcement accountable if they refuse to use those tools before arresting people.
If the David Sosa in Martin County, Florida, has no recourse when police wrongly arrest him twice based on just his name, then what is protecting us other David Sosas — or anyone else who shares a name with a criminal — from facing the same fate? The Supreme Court must hear this case and rule that the officers who arrested Sosa are not above the law.
The authors of this op-ed are 51-year-old David Sosa of Mecklenburg, N.C., and 32-year-old David Sosa of Los Angeles. They have signed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Sosa v. Martin County.