Federal appeals judges were unhappy with the jailing of a woman was unable to pay a $745 fine for driving without liability insurance and will allow her to pursue a false imprisonment claim.

But the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed U.S. District Court Judge Eleanor Ross' dismissal of the woman's central federal civil rights claims.

"We are deeply troubled by what happened" to Ziohonna Teagan in McDonough about 30 miles southeast of Atlanta, the panel wrote in an unsigned decision.

Circuit  Judge Adalberto Jordan wrote separately "to express my concern that the McDonough municipal court acted unconstitutionally by jailing Ms. Teagan for failing to pay a fine without determining whether her failure to pay was willful."

He noted Georgia law allows courts to impose community service for litigants who cannot pay fines and raised the specter of debtors' prisons.

"This practice, which does not appear to be isolated throughout municipal courts in Georgia, flouts the venerable and long-standing principle that debtors' prisons are unconstitutional," he wrote.

Jordan and Senior Judges Lanier Anderson and Gerald Tjoflat held that, under Georgia law and Eleventh Circuit precedent, Chief Judge Donald Patten of the McDonough municipal court "was acting on behalf of the state, and not on behalf of the city," in ordering Teagan to jail over the unpaid fine.

That distinction doomed her federal civil rights claim, but the panel said Judge Eleanor Ross of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia needed to revisit Teagan's state law claims of false imprisonment.

The panel noted the "only essential elements [of false imprisonment] are the arrest or detention and the unlawfulness thereof."

One of the city's lawyers, Harvey Gray of Gray, Rust, St. Amand, Moffett & Brieske, told the Daily Report that Jordan's concurrence "addresses general concerns which he is obviously passionate about; however, the general proposition that judicial decisions made by a municipal court judge acting as an independent jurist can subject a city to a damages recovery under federal law is untenable and, to my knowledge, has never been adopted by any circuit court in this country."

He added, "I do not believe that any further analysis of the state law false imprisonment claim is necessary or that it will produce a different result than Judge Ross intended when she entered a final judgment in favor of McDonough."

Teagan did not have a lawyer in municipal court, but at the Eleventh Circuit she was represented by Rogers & Hardin and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Robert Remar of Rogers & Hardin said, "What happened to Ms. Teagan was an egregious violation of her constitutional rights."

Among the problems with her jailing, he said, were a warrant for her arrest "for the non-existent offense of 'failure to pay fine' without any prior hearing to determine why she had not paid, imposing an additional $100 fine for 'contempt' without a hearing or any finding of willfulness, and then incarcerating her for 12 days due to her inability to pay the fine."

The court said Teagan was released after her brother paid the fine by drawing from government benefits and money planned to pay rent.

Remar said McDonough generated more than $7.4 million in a five-year period using these practices.