Litigation

Dustin Lance developed a painful and dangerous medical condition while in pretrial detention at the Pittsburg County Jail. He was in severe pain and pleaded with corrections officers for three days to help him. But they did not take him to the nurse or take any steps to provide the emergency medical care that he needed....

Terry v. United States—a case before the U.S. Supreme Court—seeks to correct the unfair and incorrect exclusion of low-level crack offenders from relief clearly provided by the bipartisan First Step Act, passed by Congress in 2018. In an exciting development, the United States reversed its position in this case: the Department of Justice wrote a letter...

Alongside the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, the ACLU of Illinois, and the Legal Action Center, we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit against the DuPage County Sheriff on behalf of Christine Finnigan to ensure she is provided with her prescribed medication for addiction treatment (also known as MAT) while...

Prince McCoy is an asthmatic prisoner in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. On December 28, 2016, while McCoy was languishing in solitary confinement, a correctional officer viciously attacked him with a can of pepper spray, a substance so dangerous that it is banned for use in war. Why did Officer Alamu...

Martin Crowson suffered from metabolic encephalopathy while in Washington County Purgatory Correctional Facility on an alleged parole violation. Shockingly, the jail had no written policies related to core healthcare functions, and relied on a largely absentee physician to provide treatment. As a result, the jail’s medical personnel simply assumed Mr. Crowson was detoxing and treated...

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...

The MacArthur Justice Center is pursuing a federal class action challenging the Missouri Parole Board’s demonstrated abuse of power, disregard for due process and failure to comply with state and federal law when it comes to youthful offenders previously given mandatory life without parole sentences.

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.