At the station, Dobbs and Henderson allegedly demanded a fee totaling more than $1,200, paid in cash, to secure her release. But according to Jew, it was not clear what she was being charged with – and efforts to clarify that were met with far more questions than answers.
The complaint, filed Tuesday in the Southern District Court of Mississippi, centers around what the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi alleges are violations of Jew’s fourth and 14th
Amendment rights.
They also say it’s indicative of a much larger, possibly systemic issue in the majority-Black town and seat of Holmes County.
“The Fourth Amendment claims are based on the unlawful and without probable cause, without sufficient reason, arrest, detention, jailing and excessive force used when Charles Henderson and Sam Dobbins arrested and detained and jailed Alexis,” said Joshua Tom, legal director at the ACLU of Mississippi.
After paying the fine and getting released from the jail, Jew says she contacted the Lexington Municipal Court on several occasions to find out the status of her charges and the date for what she assumed would be an approaching court appearance.
But those calls, and even in-person visits, were met with confusion by both the Municipal Court and City Hall, who said they had no record of her charges nor any scheduled court dates.
Tom says records requests filed by the ACLU produced similar results – the only official mention of her charges was within the arrest report from that night, in which the officers claim Jew was “found guilty in her absents [sic],” of failure to obey an officer, false information, obstruction of justice, disorderly conduct and misdemeanor assault.
It’s still not clear which of the charges listed on the report were her actual charges.
The suit also claims her arrest that night was decades in the making and the result of an official Lexington municipal policy known as “stop and fine” that has generated large amounts of revenue for the city since 2021, when Sam Dobbins was appointed chief.
In the first year of former police chief Dobbins’ tenure, according to data obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, revenue generated for the city of Lexington through citations issued for not wearing a seatbelt, following too closely and disturbing the peace increased by more than threefold.
“Our lawsuit alleges that that increase in revenue is a result of the ‘stop and fine’ policy, which involves arresting people, detaining and jailing them on either bogus or trumped up charges and then requiring people to pay alleged fines or alleged bonds,” said Tom. “It's not really clear what exactly from a legal perspective these monetary payments are, but they're often in large amounts, and they were always or often, if not always, required to be paid in cash. That policy was so pervasive that it could only fairly be described as the official policy of Lexington Police Department and of the city of Lexington.”
Last July, only a year into his term, a recording surfaced of Dobbins bragging to a colleague about the number of people he’d killed in the line of duty while using racial and homophobic epithets when referring to the victims.
The town’s board of aldermen fired him shortly after. But a year on and with a new chief, Charles Henderson, appointed, Black residents say a pervasive fear of traveling through Lexington remains.
At least two other federal civil rights suits have been filed against the city alleging similar practices, including a separate case also handled by the ACLU of Mississippi in which Javarius Russell, a Black man visiting Lexington only two weeks after Jew’s arrest, was placed in custody for allegedly striking and damaging a police vehicle with an ATV.
