Woman released from Philadelphia jail after a week over mistaken identity
Jenny Goldsberry
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A Philadelphia woman was arrested and placed in police custody for a week when she was mistakenly identified as a criminal in Texas.
Julie Hudson, 31, discovered a criminal record under her same name after she was denied employment several times over it. The original suspect had shoplifted in Webster, Texas while being captured on surveillance video. As the suspect shared the same name as Hudson, police mistakenly attached the criminal record to her after finding Hudson’s images on social media to be similar to the video footage.
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Hudson entered the Philadelphia Police station only to be arrested on Jan. 5th and released Wednesday. She is a PhD student who has never been to Texas.
“When you know that you didn’t do anything wrong, it makes you feel crazy,” Hudson told NBC News.
The Philadelphia police department realized the mistake after receiving a media request.
“At that time, we immediately requested that Ms. Hudson be released from custody and worked with the Philadelphia Department of Prisons to process her release in as expeditious a manner as possible,” the department wrote in a statement to the outlet. “In addition, the PPD has opened an investigation into when communication was sent from the issuing jurisdiction stating that charges were dismissed.”
“We accept charges based on the sworn evidence presented to us by law enforcement,” a spokesperson for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office wrote in a statement. “Tuesday, Webster Police notified the court of the error. We dismissed the case within five minutes and immediately contacted Philadelphia Police to release our hold on Ms. Hudson.”
“Julie Hudson is a Philadelphia resident who has no criminal record and is pursuing a Ph.D. What happened to her should not have happened, and her family deserves a great deal of credit for successfully advocating for her freedom with the media in Houston and in Philadelphia,” District Attorney Larry Krasner said of the matter.
“We are dismayed by the ordeal that she and her family went through due to an erroneous warrant from another jurisdiction, and thankful that she is now home,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenny said.
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Philadelphia has an imprisonment rate of 463 per 100,000 residents according to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative. It also found that residents of the Nicetown neighborhood, known as a community of black residents are more than fifty times as likely to be imprisoned than than residents of the Center City-West neighborhood, who are predominately white. Hudson herself is a black woman.