Litigation

We are representing the Estate of Atatiana Jefferson, who was tragically shot and killed in her own home by a Fort Worth Police Department officer.

As punishment for mental illness and self-harm, William Melendez was subjected to solitary confinement for almost seven years. The MacArthur Justice Center (MJC) is fighting to hold the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) – and departments of corrections across the country – accountable for its widespread use of solitary confinement as a punitive and cruel response to mental illness.

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...

Kellie Rehanna, a transgender woman who was brutally raped while in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ custody, has been blocked from vindicating her rights after the Bureau failed to protect her and threatened her into silence. The MacArthur Justice Center is dedicated to ensuring erroneous interpretations of state law do not prevent prisoners from holding prison officials accountable for their egregious actions.

The Alabama Department of Corrections is routinely incarcerating people past their release dates instead of releasing them to parole supervision. The MacArthur Justice Center, along with co-counsel from McGuire & Associates, Covington and Burling, and Kelly Guzzo, is fighting to hold Alabama officials accountable and uphold people's right to go home to their families and communities when their sentences are over.

The Miami Police Department (MPD) has a long-standing, widespread policy and practice of targeting community members with unlawful detentions and false arrests as well as a history of failing to hold accountable police officers who violate the law. MPD officers are accused of unlawful detentions and false arrests three times more often than police officers...

After a correctional officer filed a retaliatory false report against Jory Strizich that placed him in solitary confinement for eight months, Mr. Strizich attempted to get relief but was unable to access the prison’s convoluted grievance process. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting for prisoners like Mr. Strizich, who are prevented from getting their day in court because of erroneous interpretations of the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s exhaustion provision.

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.

An Oregon city called Grants Pass enacted “public camping” laws that banned people who are homeless from using blankets, sleeping bags, or any “material used for bedding purposes” to sleep anywhere in public in the city, under penalty of hefty fines and potential jail time. A class of involuntarily homeless residents of the city challenged the laws, and in support of the class, the MacArthur Justice Center represented four criminal law and punishment scholars as amici curiae. Our brief argued that these ordinances violated the Eighth Amendment because it is not lawful to punish someone who has done nothing wrong, like the people in Grants Pass who must sleep outside because they have nowhere else to go.

Before Jackson Maes died by suicide in a jail cell, jail officials saw him repeatedly and violently strike his head against a cell wall and heard him say he was trying to kill himself. They still failed to put him on suicide watch or obtain the mental health treatment he needed. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to ensure that qualified immunity does not shield jail and prison officials from being held accountable for their often-dangerous indifference toward prisoners’ health and safety.