Wrongly Arrested Ferguson Prisoner Henry Davis Wins Appeal To Sue Cops Who Beat Him And Then Charged Him For BLEEDING On them

A wrongly arrested man from Ferguson has won a legal appeal allowing him to sue cops for beating him while he was handcuffed in a jail cell - then charging him for bleeding on their uniforms.

Henry Davis, 52, was picked up in the Missouri town on an outstanding warrant in 2009 - by cops who didn't realize he was not the same Henry Davis named in the arrest document.

When police took him to a crowded jail cell downtown, and asked him to enter a cell with no spare bed, he asked for a mat - which police refused.

Davis then refused to go into the cell, and ended up in a fight with the officers, during which he was left badly beaten, and cops tried to charge him for property damage because they got blood on their outfits.

He was later freed - but when he tried to launch a legal case against the police force, he was told that his argument was invalid because the officers could have thought they were doing their duty during the beating.

Despite his concussion, scalp damage and other wounds from the encounter, a federal judge said that the injuries were not permanent enough to support a claim that his Fourth Amendment right to be secure in his person had been violated. 

However, after taking the decision to an appeals court, Davis was granted the right to sue, and can now launch a case against Ferguson police,The Daily Beast reported .

His attorney persuaded the appeals court by arguing that no official protections applied to the officers who attacked Davis, because they were acting maliciously and in bad faith.

Ready to sue: After winning an appeal, Davis is allowed to launch an excessive force suit against Ferguson police, members of which are pictured above in a file photograph

Davis's case came to light last year after national attention was focused on Ferguson and its police department following the shooting of Michael Brown.

Officer Darren Wilson was subject to a national outcry for killing 18-year-old Brown, and many called for him to be criminally tried - though a grand jury later decided not to charge him.

However, the outcry prompted a review of Ferguson police by the Department of Justice, which found evidence of racism in the department, and picked up a scheme that showed the police using traffic offenses and fines to milk the town's majority black population for cash.

Ferguson's chief of police resigned in the wake of the damning report, and has recently been replaced with a black officer.