Litigation

Our clients, Brian Ballentine, Catalino Dazo, and Kelly Patterson, are members of the “Sunset Activist Collective,” an activist group in Las Vegas. As part of their activist activities, the group writes protest messages critical of the police in chalk on the sidewalks in front of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police headquarters and the state courthouse....

On September 1, 2018, a City of Arlington, Texas police officer pulled over O’Shae Terry for an expired registration tag. After approaching Terry’s side of the vehicle, the officer smelled marijuana, and went back to her patrol car, leaving Terry and his passenger, Terrence Harmon, with officer Bau Tran, who was standing next to the...

The MacArthur Justice Center is suing Orleans District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro in light of his office’s practice of gathering evidence using subpoenas that do not have the required advance approval of a court. The suit asks the Orleans Parish Civil District Court to order Cannizzaro to comply with a 2015 public records request for copies of district attorney...

For two decades, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections held Roderick Johnson on death row in solitary confinement. The DOC even refused to remove Mr. Johnson from solitary confinement when his conviction and death sentence were vacated after the Commonwealth’s evidence was found wholly unreliable. Mr. Johnson sued pro se, raising Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment claims,...

John Buchanan is a transtibial, or below-the-knee, amputee who also has severe disabilities in his arm and hand. After ten months of pre-trial incarceration in Harris County Jail, guards abruptly punished Mr. Buchanan by moving him out of his handicapped-accessible cell and into one that made life intolerably difficult. For the next four months, housed...

Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled Unmastered.” Snoop Dogg’s “Tha Blue Carpet Treatment.” And Elijah Muhammad’s “Message to the Blackman in America.” The Arizona Department of Corrections confiscated those and other CDs and books from our client, Edward Lee Jones, citing various regulations about drug-related, sexual, or violent content. Meanwhile, other prisoners were allowed to watch TV shows like...

An emergency class action lawsuit has been against Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart, asking for the immediate release of medically vulnerable people in the Cook County Jail in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.

In the days leading up to Mr. Rivera’s civil rights trial in which he was representing himself, Mr. Rivera repeatedly asked prison officials for access to electronic legal research material. But the computers were broken, and Defendants never fixed them. So Mr. Rivera instead asked for print research materials, including the Federal Rules of Evidence...

A cartoon of a police officer beating an unarmed civilian (caption: “protecting and serving the poop out of you”); a clip from a Chris Rock sketch entitled “How not to get your ass kicked by the police” (sample “tip” from the video: “get a white friend”); and a meme mocking police violence—these are among the...

In 1971, in a case called Bivens v. Six Unnamed Agents, the Supreme Court held that ordinary people could sue federal officials for money damages where federal officials violated the United States Constitution. But that landmark ruling has been pared back in the decades since. Joseph Randolph Mays was fired from his prison job in retaliation...