Jonathan H. Feinberg

The Mother at the Jail Door

On March 30, 2015, eighteen-year-old Tori Herr called her mother from a Pennsylvania jail and begged for lemonade. Stephanie Moyer drove there. The jail denied her a visit and said her daughter was fine. One day later, Tori’s heart stopped.

Tori Herr’s Four Days in Jail

Victoria “Tori” Herr entered Lebanon County Correctional Facility on March 27 after her first arrest. She told intake staff that she was using as many as ten bags of heroin a day. The jail placed her on a withdrawal protocol. During the next four days, she vomited, suffered severe diarrhea and hallucinations, stopped eating, and struggled to keep down water or a nutritional drink.

Her request for lemonade reached her mother on March 30. Moyer arrived at the jail but could not see her. On March 31, Herr visited the medical unit and then collapsed. Staff returned her to the housing area instead of sending her to a hospital. She collapsed again and went into cardiac arrest.

Herr was revived after several minutes, but loss of oxygen caused catastrophic brain injury. She never regained consciousness and died April 5. Medical experts retained for the civil action concluded that emergency-room treatment with intravenous fluids would have saved her life.

Jonathan Feinberg litigated Moyer’s case with Emma Freudenberger and Rick Sawyer of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. The complaint examined what Herr disclosed at intake, what officers and medical staff observed, how often they checked her, what the medical records contained, why she was returned to housing, and why no one summoned emergency transport. It alleged that county policy, contractor practices, supervision, and individual decisions allowed a serious medical need to become fatal.

The complaint also alleged that the jail failed to conduct a meaningful internal investigation and that a nurse falsely claimed to have taken Herr’s vital signs. Medical records and other staff testimony were cited against that account. Those accusations remained allegations. Lebanon County’s $4.75 million settlement in 2018 resolved the civil-rights claims without a trial finding that every pleaded fact was true.

The constitutional premise did not depend on whether the person in custody had arrived through illness, injury, or addiction. Jailers had taken control of Herr’s access to water, medicine, transportation, and outside help.

The ICE Detainer That Kept Galarza Jailed

Ernesto Galarza carried the proof of his citizenship in the property room of Lehigh County Prison. Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, he was working at an Allentown construction site in November 2008 when the contractor sold cocaine to an undercover detective. Police arrested the contractor, Galarza, and two other workers. The criminal complaint recorded Galarza’s New Jersey birthplace and Social Security number. His wallet held a Pennsylvania driver’s license and Social Security card.

A surety company posted his $15,000 bail the next day. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent nevertheless issued a detainer identifying Galarza as a suspected citizen of the Dominican Republic. The detainer was not a warrant, a removal order, or an affidavit establishing probable cause. Jail staff held him through the weekend.

On Monday, a counselor finally told Galarza why he remained confined. He again said he was an American citizen and asked the counselor to retrieve his identification. The counselor refused. ICE officers later verified his citizenship and withdrew the detainer at 2:05 p.m. The county released him more than six hours later. He lost a part-time job and was ultimately acquitted of the criminal charge.

Feinberg served with lawyers from the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, and Seth Kreimer. Lehigh County argued that federal regulation required it to honor ICE’s detainer. The Third Circuit read the regulation and the form differently. A detainer requested custody; it did not command it. Federal immigration officials were free to request local custody, but the county retained the choice and remained responsible for it.

The Third Circuit allowed Galarza to continue his claims against the county without deciding liability. The United States and City of Allentown later paid a combined $50,000, Lehigh County paid $95,000, and the county ended its policy of imprisoning people solely on ICE detainers without court authority. The aggregate settlement was $145,000.

In April 2025, the ACLU again advised Pennsylvania counties that Galarza remains governing Third Circuit law. A federal request does not erase the local government’s duty to determine whether confinement has a constitutional basis.

Six Stops after Galarza

The rule recognized in Galarza later reached Pennsylvania highways. Ten Latino drivers and passengers challenged six state-police encounters during 2017 and 2018. Five occurred in south-central Pennsylvania and one in Bucks County. The Marquez complaint alleged that troopers demanded immigration papers, investigated civil immigration status, and kept people on the roadside after the traffic purpose of the stop had ended.

Feinberg served as pro bono co-counsel with ACLU Pennsylvania lawyers, a Faegre Drinker team led by Mark Taticchi, and Seth Kreimer. The plaintiffs alleged racial profiling and a broader practice of state officers assuming authority assigned to federal civil-immigration officials. The state police disputed liability. The case ended by settlement rather than a merits judgment.

The 2022 agreement required $865,000 in total payments, including attorney fees, and changed what state troopers could do during future stops. State-police policy now states that troopers do not enforce civil immigration law. Officers may not prolong a stop to investigate immigration status, use an immigration check merely to verify identity, or treat an ICE detainer as an independent basis for arrest or detention.

Galarza established that a county jail remained responsible for detention based on a federal request. Marquez applied that limit to traffic stops: state officers could not extend a stop to investigate civil immigration status without independent authority.

Byron Halsey’s Fabricated-Confession Claim

Byron Halsey spent twenty-two years in prison because a written statement attributed to him contained details only investigators and the murderer knew. In 1985, two children were sexually assaulted and killed in the basement of their New Jersey apartment building. Halsey, their mother’s boyfriend, had a sixth-grade education and significant cognitive limitations. He returned from work after learning of the deaths and entered an interrogation that continued across multiple days.

Detectives told Halsey that he had failed a polygraph examination, though later analysis showed that he had passed. They confronted him with false incriminating information and questioned him for hours without counsel. Halsey maintained that he never confessed. He said he signed the document because he was exhausted, frightened, and desperate to leave the interrogation room.

The purported confession described nonpublic facts with terrible precision. It became the only direct evidence linking Halsey to the crimes. A jury convicted him, and he received two life terms plus twenty years.

DNA testing in 2007 excluded Halsey and identified the neighboring man who had testified against him at trial. New Jersey released Halsey and dismissed the charges. He then sued the detectives, alleging that they fabricated the confession, coerced his signature, and maliciously prosecuted him.

Feinberg and David Rudovsky handled the civil action with Peter Neufeld and Emma Freudenberger; Rudovsky argued the appeal. The Third Circuit reviewed whether Halsey had produced sufficient evidence for a jury to decide the disputed interrogation account and fabrication claims.

Fabrication Is More Than Error

The Third Circuit reversed in April 2014. It held that a state actor violates due process by deliberately fabricating significant evidence used to obtain a conviction when there is a reasonable likelihood the defendant would not have been convicted without it. The purported confession supplied the prosecution’s only direct link between Halsey and the murders. Halsey’s evidence permitted a jury to find that investigators supplied its contents.

The court drew a boundary around the claim. A jury’s later rejection does not transform a mistaken report, inconsistency, or disputed recollection into constitutional fabrication. The plaintiff must present evidence of deliberate falsification, and the manufactured evidence must matter to the conviction.

The opinion also reinstated Halsey’s malicious-prosecution and coercion claims. The prosecutor’s charging decision alone failed to break the causal chain because the statement attributed to Halsey materially supplied probable cause. The prosecutor testified that the statement was essential to his decision to bring charges that night.

These were summary-judgment holdings, not findings that the detectives were liable. The court viewed disputed facts in Halsey’s favor and returned them for trial. The defendants instead entered a $12.5 million global settlement in 2015.

The settlement ended Halsey’s individual case. The constitutional rule remained. A wrongfully convicted person in the Third Circuit has a stand-alone Fourteenth Amendment claim when fabricated trial evidence materially caused the conviction; the theory need not be forced into the different elements of malicious prosecution.

A Right Established after the Arrest

Amanda Geraci attended a 2012 anti-fracking protest outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center as a trained legal observer. When police began arresting a protester, she moved to photograph the encounter without obstructing officers. An officer pushed her against a pillar and pinned her there for one to three minutes. Other officers surrounded the scene and blocked observers’ view.

One year later, Temple University sophomore Richard Fields stood on a public sidewalk while police broke up a party across the street. He took a photograph with his phone. An officer handcuffed him, placed him in a police van, seized and searched the phone, and cited him for obstructing a highway. The charge was withdrawn.

Feinberg served as co-counsel with ACLU Pennsylvania, Langer Grogan & Diver, and Seth Kreimer. Molly Tack-Hooper argued the consolidated appeal. The District Court had dismissed the First Amendment claims because Fields and Geraci did not announce a critical or expressive purpose while recording. The Third Circuit rejected that requirement in 2017.

The First Amendment protects access to information about what public officials do in public. A person does not need to deliver a speech before opening a camera. The court held that photographing, filming, and audio-recording police performing official duties in public are protected activities.

The right has limits. Reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions remain available, and actual obstruction of police work falls outside the protected activity. Fields photographed from across the street. Geraci moved to observe without getting in the officers’ way. Neither record supplied a safety or operational justification for the retaliation alleged.

The individual officers nevertheless received qualified immunity on the First Amendment claims. The right had not been clearly established in the Third Circuit when the 2012 and 2013 incidents occurred. The officers received qualified immunity because the right was not clearly established in 2012 and 2013. The Third Circuit’s ruling gave later officers clear notice that the First Amendment protects recording police.

Philadelphia later paid a combined $250,000, including attorney fees, to settle the Fields and Geraci cases. The payment resolved their claims. The appellate rule set a constitutional limit on what police may demand of the next person holding a phone on a public sidewalk.

Children Sent East

In May 2018, federal officers near Yuma, Arizona, separated five Guatemalan mothers from their children. The children were five, seven, twelve, five, and six years old. Each family remained apart for more than two months. Most children were sent to shelters in New York, approximately two thousand miles from their mothers.

The government provided little information about where the children had gone and allowed only limited communication. The mothers could not decide where their children slept, who cared for them, when they could speak, or how reunification would occur. Federal officers had taken physical custody of both generations and then divided them between institutions.

Feinberg participated through his firm in a team that included the National Immigrant Justice Center, American Immigration Council, National Immigration Litigation Alliance, and Arnold & Porter. The families brought negligence and intentional-infliction claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act. They alleged that separation was used to deter other families from seeking asylum and that the government lacked adequate systems for tracking, communication, care, and reunification.

The claims did not arise simply because separation caused trauma. The FTCA required the families to identify duties cognizable under governing tort law, overcome the government’s statutory exceptions, and prove how the actions of federal employees breached those duties and caused injury.

The Families’ Duty-of-Care Ruling

The United States invoked the discretionary-function exception, which protects policy judgments within lawful governmental discretion from tort liability. It also disputed duty, breach, causation, and the elements of intentional infliction of emotional distress.

In October 2023, the District Court held that federal immigration officials had created a special custodial relationship and owed the families a duty of reasonable care. The government had not shown that the challenged conduct belonged within protected policy discretion. Taking custody of a parent and child carried legal obligations for their safety and care.

The ruling did not decide the whole case. It gave the plaintiffs partial summary judgment on the existence of duty. Whether officials breached that duty remained contested. The court also denied both sides’ attempts to win the intentional-infliction claim at summary judgment, leaving that claim for trial.

A bench trial was scheduled for April 23, 2024. The parties reported conditional settlements on April 10. The court approved the agreements in July, directed the minor plaintiffs’ shares into pooled trusts, and the United States paid $1.353 million in total. The action was dismissed with prejudice on October 22.

No trial determined breach or intentional infliction. The settlement resolved the families’ claims. The court’s duty ruling remained intact after the settlement.

Civil-Rights Teaching at Penn

Feinberg graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1997 and from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2001. He clerked for Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro and joined Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin in 2006. He has taught civil-rights litigation at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School since 2013.

He also serves as president of the National Police Accountability Project. The organization brings together lawyers who litigate misconduct by police and correctional officials. Its work places doctrine beside the practical problems that decide a case: preserving video, identifying officers, obtaining internal files, proving municipal policy, defeating immunity, distinguishing an officer’s conduct from a municipal policy or practice, and building a record capable of appellate review.

Herr involved jail and medical responses to withdrawal symptoms; Galarza addressed county detention on an ICE request; Halsey concerned alleged fabrication of a confession; Fields protected public recording of police; and C.M. addressed federal duties after taking custody of a family.