A Black trans woman has been awarded $1.5 million dollars after she was wrongly arrested and jailed for almost six months.
In 2015, two police officers arrested Ju’Zema Goldring for jaywalking in Atlanta and then claimed they found cocaine hidden inside a stress ball in her purse.
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A 2018 lawsuit, however, argued that there was nothing inside the ball, and that the officers who arrested her – Vladimir Henry and Juan Restrepo – called her anti-trans slurs and subjected her to an “invasive search,” according to the New York Times.
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The lawsuit also claims that when Goldring was taken to the county jail, she heard one officer tell Henry to “Give it up, buddy” because the drug test results on the stress ball kept coming back negative.
Goldring then was forced to wait in jail for almost half a year until test results came back from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation because she could not afford the $25,500 bond.
Eventually, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation results revealed that there were no drugs found inside the stress ball, and Goldring was released.
Goldring’s attorney said she has suffered mental health issues since her time in jail and that, despite being held in a dorm specifically for trans women, she became a victim of sexual misconduct.
In his ruling granting Goldring the $1.5 million, Judge William Ray II called the 2015 incident a “bogus charge” and lambasted the officers for arresting Goldring for jaywalking in the first place.
Doing so, he said, could “seriously disrupt a person’s life,” adding that the officers should devote their time to “more pressing activities, such as addressing violent crimes.”
