Jonathan H. Feinberg

Jonathan H. Feinberg litigated her mother Stephanie Moyer's civil-rights case with Emma Freudenberger and Rick Sawyer of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. The case rebuilt those days from the inside: the intake disclosures, the monitoring, the medical records, the staff observations, the supervision, the contractor's practices, and the decision — the one that mattered — not to obtain emergency treatment. Medical records and staff testimony dismantled the jail's internal account, and the medical experts retained in the civil action concluded that emergency-room treatment with intravenous fluids would have saved Herr's life.

The representation produced a $4.75 million settlement in 2018, and a framing of the constitutional duty that runs through Feinberg's custodial work: the jail controlled Herr's access to water, medicine, transportation, and outside help. Her diagnosis did not reduce that duty. It made timely medical attention more important.

His work in custody continued. As part of the team representing the family of Tyrone Briggs, who died in the care of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Feinberg helped secure an $8.5 million settlement.

A Piece of Paper, Not a Warrant

Ernesto Galarza made bail — and stayed in jail anyway, held on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer. Galarza was born in New Jersey. His identification and recorded birthplace were available to the jail the entire time.

In Galarza v. Szalczyk, Feinberg helped establish a principle that now governs detention decisions nationwide: an ICE detainer requests custody but does not compel it. The detainer that kept Galarza confined was not a warrant, not a removal order, not an affidavit establishing probable cause. The Third Circuit held that Lehigh County retained responsibility for its own detention decision and restored Galarza's claims against the county. The United States and the City of Allentown paid a combined $50,000, Lehigh County paid $95,000 — and the county ended its policy of holding people solely on ICE detainers without court authority.

Feinberg then helped carry the principle statewide. Marquez v. Commonwealth arose from six Pennsylvania State Police encounters with Latino drivers and passengers in 2017 and 2018 — five in south-central Pennsylvania, one in Bucks County — in which troopers demanded immigration papers, investigated civil immigration status, and kept people on the roadside after the traffic purpose of the stop had ended. The completed resolution produced a revised statewide policy, mandatory training, continued traffic-stop data collection, and expanded contact reporting. Under the policy, troopers do not enforce civil immigration law: they may not prolong a traffic stop to investigate immigration status, may not run an immigration check merely to verify identity, and may not treat an ICE detainer as an independent basis for detention or arrest.

The Confession That Was Manufactured

DNA testing excluded Byron Halsey, and the charges against him were dismissed after he had spent decades imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. The prosecution's only direct evidence linking him to those crimes had been a written confession attributed to him.

Feinberg helped develop Halsey's civil action and the appellate record challenging qualified immunity, and the Third Circuit's resulting opinion became a landmark: deliberately fabricating significant evidence used to obtain a conviction violates due process when there is a reasonable likelihood the defendant would not have been convicted without it. The court was careful about what the rule covers — deliberate falsification, not a mistaken report, an inconsistency, or a disputed recollection — and it held that the prosecutor's charging decision did not break the causal chain, because the prosecutor himself testified that he would not have charged Halsey that night without the confession.

The court reinstated Halsey's fabrication, malicious-prosecution, and coercion claims and returned the case to a trial path. The defendants entered a $12.5 million global settlement in 2015. Feinberg's wrongful-conviction practice has continued to produce results, including an $8.2 million settlement from prosecutors and police for the estate of Kevin Siehl.

The Camera Across the Street

Richard Fields photographed a police scene from across the street. Amanda Geraci moved to observe an arrest without getting in the officers' way. Feinberg helped develop their consolidated First Amendment appeal, and in 2017 the Third Circuit held that photographing, filming, and audio-recording police performing official duties in public are constitutionally protected activities — subject to reasonable restrictions and the prohibition against actual obstruction, but not to a requirement that a person announce an expressive purpose before pressing record.

Neither record before the court showed obstruction; neither supplied a safety or interference justification for the retaliation alleged. Philadelphia later settled both cases, and the decision now protects every member of the public who documents police activity without interfering with officers' work.

When Philadelphia police met the 2020 protests over George Floyd's murder with what Feinberg's firm described as excessive, militarized force, he and a broad-based litigation team represented more than 340 people who suffered it, securing a $9.25 million settlement with the city.

Five Mothers

Feinberg helped represent five Guatemalan mothers and their children in Federal Tort Claims Act litigation over family separation. In October 2023, the district court denied the United States' summary-judgment motions, holding that the government had not shown the discretionary-function exception barred the families' claims — and going further: federal immigration officials had created a special custodial relationship, and the families were entitled to partial summary judgment on the existence of a duty of reasonable care.

The litigation developed the government's tracking, communication, care, and reunification systems — the machinery of separation itself. The court approved settlements in 2024, and the United States paid $1.353 million in total, a resolution built on the favorable duty ruling.

Teaching and National Leadership

Feinberg graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1997 and, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2001, where he won the Best Oralist prize in the Keedy Cup moot court competition. He clerked for Judge Jan E. DuBois of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, joined Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin in 2002, and became a partner — and part of the firm's name — in 2006.

He served on the University of Pennsylvania Law School's Civil Practice Clinic faculty in 2007–08 and returned in 2022 as an adjunct instructor teaching plaintiff-side civil-rights litigation. He serves as president of the National Police Accountability Project, the membership organization of more than five hundred lawyers and legal workers nationwide focused on civil rights litigation against law enforcement misconduct. There he founded and chaired the amicus committee, co-authoring Supreme Court briefs in Hernandez v. Mesa and Brownback v. King, and he regularly consults and co-counsels with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, and other public interest organizations — the network of other lawyers, community groups, and activists without which, he says, this work cannot be done.