“Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears” is a blog series documenting the harmful impact of President Trump’s judges on Americans’ rights and liberties. It includes judges nominated in both his first and second terms.
Two Trump judges ordered the dismissal of a widow’s lawsuit against government officials involved in her husband’s death in custody and subsequent coverup. Judges Cory Wilson and James Ho ruled that she had filed her lawsuit after the statute of limitations, even though it was the alleged coverup that kept her from suing sooner. The August 2025 Fifth Circuit case was Jenkins v. Tahmahkera.
What was this case about?
Robert Miller was arrested on July 31, 2019. A few days later, his wife Shanelle Jenkins learned from a newspaper article that he had died in custody at the Tarrant County Jail on August 1. She made repeated calls and written requests to learn what had happened to him. It took nearly a year for the government to turn over the autopsy report, which said he had died of natural causes due to “sickle cell crisis.” Jenkins kept trying to obtain more information, but county and state agencies refused to disclose the records she needed.
Jenkins sued the government entities for violating her husband’s civil rights through excessive force and wrongful death. But because she had so little information to support those claims, her complaint was dismissed.
The very next day, the government finally began turning over the records. By April of 2022, she learned that jail officials had put her husband into a full-body metal restraint, pepper-sprayed him multiple times, then left him without medical treatment for his asthma while he suffocated to death. But now the statute of limitations had passed, and she was not allowed to reopen the suit against the government entities.
However, for the first time, she knew the identities of the specific people involved in her husband’s death and subsequent coverup. So in 2022, she filed a lawsuit against them. The issue in the case before the Fifth Circuit was whether this second lawsuit should be dismissed for having been filed after the two-year statute of limitations.
What did the Trump judges do, and how does it harm us?
In an opinion written by Judge Wilson and joined by Judge Ho, the court ruled that Jenkins waited too long to sue the individuals. They ruled that the two-year statute of limitations began to run in August 2019, when Jenkins read the newspaper article. Although she had made repeated efforts to get information about her husband’s death, the Trump judges criticized her for not using the discovery tools that would have been available in a lawsuit against individuals, even if she did not know who those individuals were.
Judge Stephen Higginson, an Obama nominee, dissented. Among other things, he noted that Jenkins had filed a lawsuit in time, in which discovery could have yielded information sooner: the suit against the government entities. But rather than allowing discovery, a court had dismissed it as having insufficiently supported allegations.
Under the majority’s logic, Higginson noted, Jenkins should have filed the second lawsuit (against the individuals) by August 2021, which was before the government had released any documents at all. But, he wrote, under Texas law, the two-year period only began once Jenkins had reason to know the identities of those involved in the events surrounding her husband’s death. Given the government’s “stonewalling,” that could not have occurred until at least 2022, when she finally received access to the records she had been seeking since 2019. The delay was “the government’s doing, not her own.”
Higginson criticized the majority for an opinion that “abounds with hindsight.” He also pointed out that Wilson and Ho had provided government officials “a recipe for evading” liability.
The ruling illustrates the importance of our federal courts to protecting our rights and our lives. When judges essentially reward government officials for covering up abuse leading to someone’s death, we are all in grave danger.