A Minnesota woman has resuscitated her effort to sue a police officer who jailed her as a teenager for two years on false charges associated with a sham sex trafficking investigation that the FBI once billed as its largest human trafficking crackdown. The case is another example of the legal labyrinth victims are required to navigate when attempting to get recourse after the government infringes on their rights and once again raises the question: How inoculated should those government officials be from civil suits for violating the Constitution?

Hamdi Mohamud's odyssey began over a decade ago when St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker had her arrested on witness tampering charges concerning a woman named Muna Abdulkadir, who allegedly attacked Mohamud and her friends at knifepoint. Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker's sex-trafficking case, which, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit conceded, was "plagued with problems from the start." Some of those problems included Weyker lying under oath, coercing witnesses, editing police reports, and making up evidence.