The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up a lawsuit against a St. Paul police sergeant, bringing to a close a case that began with federal charges 15 years ago.
When the charges were filed in November 2010, Sgt. Heather Weyker and her supervisor said they had spent thousands of hours on the case. Weyker, who was assigned to a human trafficking task force, had started the investigation in 2008, after police said a family had contacted them and asked for help.
Thirty people were accused of being part of a multistate child sex trafficking operation that took place in Minnesota, Ohio and Tennessee.
A district court later opined that Weyker “likely exaggerated or fabricated important aspects of this story,” and she was caught “lying to the grand jury and, later, lying during a detention hearing,” according to a 2016 U.S. Court of Appeals decision for the Sixth Circuit.
One of the people caught up in the case was Hamdi Mohamud, then a teenager.
Hamdi Mohamud (Courtesy of the Institute for Justice)
“Weyker’s false claims led to Mohamud’s arrest, prosecution, and nearly two years in federal detention before the government ultimately dropped the charges and Weyker’s larger trafficking investigation fell apart after courts caught Weyker lying repeatedly and determined that her case may be ‘fictitious,’” the Institute for Justice, who represented Mohamud in her lawsuit, wrote in a press release Monday, the day the Supreme Court decided not to take up her lawsuit.
“In all, more than 30 people had their lives upended because of Weyker’s dishonesty,” the release continued. “None was convicted of a crime, but with the Supreme Court’s decision today, none of the more-than-two-dozen lawsuits against Weyker resulted in accountability. Despite her flagrant disregard of the Constitution, Weyker will face no legal accountability.”
The lawsuits’ demise also point to the difficulty in suing federal officers, such as those who fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, said Patrick Jaicomo, Institute for Justice senior attorney, who represented Mohamud.
“The problems of ICE are not just problems of ICE,” he said. “This is a problem of federal accountability across the board.”
She remains a sergeant
Weyker, who joined the St. Paul Police Department in 1997, is still a St. Paul officer. She’s assigned to Western District investigations.
She was put on administrative leave from the department on March 4, 2016, soon after the federal appeals court decision on the case, and returned to work on March 9, 2016.
It does not appear she was disciplined by the police department. Internal affairs investigations that result in discipline against public employees are public information in Minnesota, but no discipline in Weyker’s work record are related to the sex trafficking investigation.
The U.S. Department of Justice represented Weyker in the lawsuit, and a spokesperson declined comment Tuesday.
The Supreme Court typically does not state a reason for not taking up a case, which was true in the lawsuit against Weyker. It marks “the end of the line” for the lawsuits and “accountability” against Weyker, Jaicomo said.
Federal or local officer?
Most of the lawsuits against Weyker were thrown out because people sued her as a federal agent, according to Jaicomo. The Supreme Court has maintained that federal agents can only be sued under narrow circumstances.
Ifrah Yassin was 19 or 20 when she was arrested for allegedly intimidating a federal witness in the sex trafficking case, and she was later acquitted when she proved she was out of the country at the time. Mohamud was charged in the same matter before the case against her was dismissed.
In Yassin’s lawsuit against Weyker, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit previously wrote that Weyker did not have qualified immunity because “a reasonable officer would know that deliberately misleading another officer into arresting an innocent individual to protect a sham investigation is unlawful, regardless of the difficulties presented by the case.”
Compared to people who were imprisoned for years, Yassin said Tuesday that she felt lucky she was only in jail for a couple of weeks and in a halfway house for two months, though she had to give birth while wearing an electronic ankle monitor.
“I really wish people could get their justice,” Yassin said. “It sticks with me because when you google my name, it still comes up and it’s quite embarrassing. It’s caused me issues at work and in my personal life.”
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Attorneys said Weyker was a St. Paul officer who was deputized to work as a federal task force officer. The Eighth Circuit concluded that Weyker could not be sued because she was working as a federal officer at the time.
Continuing to work on Mohamud’s lawsuit, Jaicomo said, “We found all these documents that showed that the task force Heather Weyker was working on … the Gerald D. Vick Task Force of Minnesota, was a St. Paul-led task force,” and they argued she was working as a state officer and not a federal officer.
That led to Jaicomo petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the case. Attorneys ask the high court to take up 7,000-8,000 cases a year, and they hear arguments in about 80 cases.
The Supreme Court had previously declined to hear Mohamud’s lawsuit in 2022 and Yassin’s lawsuit against Weyker in 2023. The DOJ filed a brief in opposition to Mohamud’s case being heard previously.
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