Lawsuit accuses Mercer County of illegally housing children in adult jail

A 16-year-old Mercer County boy spent several weeks incarcerated in an adult jail, where he endured strip searches and got pepper-sprayed while naked, all in violation of state law and his constitutional rights, a new lawsuit charges.

A state judge twice sent the boy to the Mercer County Correction Center after his August 2024 arrest even though the state Youth Justice Commission twice warned officials the placement was illegal, ordered his transfer to a juvenile facility, and told them to “immediately cease” detaining youth in the adult jail, according to the civil rights lawsuit filed Monday in state Superior Court.

The New Jersey Code of Juvenile Justice prohibits placing anyone under 18 in any prison, jail, or other adult lockup and prioritizes rehabilitation over punishment.

Yet the boy, who is identified only as W.H. in the lawsuit, spent two two-week stints in October and November 2024 at the county jail and said he heard and saw another underage boy there too.

Repeatedly detaining children in adult jails, especially after receiving written notice from the state not to do so, suggests the court and county have a policy, practice, and custom of violating the constitutional rights of children in their custody, attorneys Alexander Shalom and Jennifer Bagger Jamerson wrote in their complaint. It also amounts to deliberate indifference and cruel and unusual punishment, especially given that W.H. was being held pretrial and hadn’t been adjudicated delinquent, the attorneys added.

Children in the youth justice system, as some of the state’s most vulnerable residents, require more protection — and are given it under state law, which recognizes that children are more susceptible to harm and more capable of rehabilitation, Shalom said.

“New Jersey has had for many years a law in the books that says you can’t house children in adult jails, and that’s for darn good reason,” Shalom said. “Notwithstanding that, they held a 16-year-old in an adult jail, which is just so anathema to our code of youth justice, which is supposed to be for the betterment of the child and for their rehabilitation. We know that’s not what adult jails are about. We think that’s crazy, and that our client is entitled to recompense for their flagrant violation of the law.”

The lawsuit names as defendants Judge Rodney Thompson, who presides over family court in Superior Court’s Mercer County vicinage and signed the orders under which W.H. was placed in the county jail; Mercer County Executive Dan Benson; and Timothy Friel, the jail’s warden. Spokespeople for the county and courts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mercer County doesn’t have a juvenile detention facility and typically houses in-custody youth in neighboring counties that do, like Middlesex County.

After W.H. got arrested, Thompson sent him to Mercer House, a youth shelter, according to the lawsuit. He ran away a few weeks later, police found and rearrested him, and Thompson ordered him to be placed in the adult jail, the lawsuit says. Conditions are so bad in the century-old jail, an 871-bed, mixed-custody men’s facility just outside Lambertville, that inmates have sued and officials began calling for its closure a decade ago.

W.H. spent two weeks at the county jail before officers took him back to the youth shelter, but he got into a fight there and landed back to court, where Thompson returned him to the county jail for another two weeks, the lawsuit says. He later got transferred to juvenile detention facilities in Middlesex and Essex counties before being released to a relative in February 2025, the lawsuit says.

Thompson and other officials “went beyond what was necessary to accomplish any legitimate penological objective,” Shalom and Jamerson wrote. They shouldn’t have illegally placed him in an adult jail, but once they did, they shouldn’t have strip-searched and pepper-sprayed him, held him alone in a cell that had no mattress or pillow the first night, and placed him where he could see and hear adult inmates, who he found intimidating, the attorneys said.

Those traumatic, degrading experiences left him with lasting emotional and psychological injuries, they wrote.

They want a judge to declare both W.H.’s 2024 detention and the practice of placing children in adult jails an unconstitutional violation of state law and prohibit officials from placing any other youth in adult lockups.

W.H.’s placement in the adult jail came at a time when the state was struggling with a shortage of juvenile detention space. Only seven counties in New Jersey have juvenile detention facilities — Atlantic, Bergen, Camden, Essex, Middlesex, Morris, and Ocean. The other 14 counties typically contract with those seven counties for their youth detention needs.

In a lawsuit filed in September 2024, Atlantic County accused the Youth Justice Commission of shirking its duty to manage where youth charged with crimes should be housed and booting that responsibility to the counties. Atlantic County officials complained that overcrowding led to riots and delays in youth placements.

A judge ruled in the county’s favor in December 2024, declared the commission solely responsible for youth detention statewide, and ordered commission officials to take charge.