Litigation

Darrin Bass had his mattress removed for a month for a dismissed misconduct charge. Without his mattress, he was forced to sleep on a concrete slab with large metal screws sticking out of it. The MacArthur Justice Center took on his case to fight against these inhumane conditions.

The City of Chicago – a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state – has been a target of the Trump Administration’s cruel immigration enforcement campaign since day one. Since the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz” on September 8, 2025, large numbers of residents, predominantly from the Latine community, have been profiled and arrested everyday by...

  Phillip Weeks, a local activist who runs the non-profit news site The Gram, has filed suit against the City of St. Louis for violating the state’s Sunshine Law by refusing to give him information about vehicle stops conducted by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD).   In denying Weeks’ request, SLMPD has claimed...

The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to ensure that private contractors can’t slow down urgent cases with immediate, mid-litigation appeals.

While Matthew Locke was peacefully protesting, a county sheriff and his chief deputy used extreme and gratuitous “pain compliance” tactics on him, causing him severe pain and neurological injury. The district court threw out Mr. Locke’s excessive-force suit based on the judicially invented doctrine of qualified immunity. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to ensure...

When Christian Lauria, a pro se prisoner-plaintiff, attempted to obtain legal relief through the Western District of Pennsylvania for a violent assault by corrections officers, the court threw out his case on a technicality—one he had never even been told existed in the first place. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to ensure that pro se prisoners like Mr. Lauria get their day in court when they seek to hold corrections officers accountable for wrongdoing.

The MacArthur Justice Center, alongside our partners at the Southern Poverty Law Center, have taken up Ms. Jewell’s case on appeal to correct this erroneous and unjust application of the felony murder doctrine and ensure that good and decent people like Ms. Jewell not be branded as murderers for tragic but unintentional accidents.

Terri McGuire-Mollica, proceeding pro se, sued federal prison officials for their years-long failure to treat a painful uterine fibroid that caused severe bleeding and other complications. Although she did everything Bureau of Prisons (BOP) regulations required of her to pursue her claim, the district court wrongly dismissed her case under the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s...

Jerry Cintron spent two and a half years in a room no bigger than a parking spot as punishment for a disease that affects millions of Americans: opioid use disorder (OUD). The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting alongside Mr. Cintron to advocate for the ending of solitary confinement—particularly in response to mental and physical health crises—a horrific practice that all but ensures poor, and sometimes deadly, outcomes for incarcerated people.

When Ricky Sanabria, Jr. told a jail officer that he feared an attack by his increasingly aggressive cellmate, the officer moved him—but less than two hours later, the officer locked Mr. Sanabria back in with the cellmate. The very next day, the furious cellmate bit off Mr. Sanabria’s ear. After Mr. Sanabria sued, the district...