Federal courts make it all but impossible to win suits against police officers who are working as part of federal operations. By Maya Rao. She had just given birth in a Nashville jail, and her mother flew from Minneapolis to take the baby.
Ahmed couldn't hold him. She couldn't breastfeed him. She asked her mom about the newborn day after day: "Is he okay? How is he doing? The boy would be fine; Ahmed, less so. She spent two years locked up for a crime she did not commit, and even after she returned home, depression and anguish darkened her life until she was found dead just shy of her 29th birthday.
Now a lengthy legal battle against the St. Paul police officer whose word helped put her in jail is nearing the end after a recent appeals court ruling in a related case. Ahmed was among 23 Somali Americans who sued officer Heather Weyker for allegationsthat led them to spend a collective 44 years behind bars for crimes of which they were never convicted. None has prevailed so far, and Ahmed's story illustrates how the courts have made it increasingly difficult to win redress against a cop who is federally deputized.
I don't care if you're a police officer. I don't care if you work for the government. The FBI scored big headlines in when it announced that 29 people β all but one Somali β were indicted for participating in a gang-related juvenile sex trafficking ring transporting Black girls from Minneapolis to Nashville. The case was also a major one for Weyker, a St. Paul officer who served on the FBI sex trafficking task force and helped lead the investigation.
She spent years interviewing a troubled teen who was an alleged victim and key to the prosecution. And Weyker cultivated witness Muna Abdulkadir, who told her how the teen was prostituted. Hundreds of pages of court documents lay out how the case unfolded. Ahmed had been friendly with Abdulkadir, but would later insist in court that she didn't know Abdulkadir had testified before a grand jury in a high-profile federal prosecution.
