A proposal by the U.S. Department of Commerce to include a new citizenship question in the 2020 census under the guise of enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) threatened to undermine an accurate census by undercounting the communities the VRA was designed to protect. The SPLC joined...
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The SPLC and its allies filed a federal class action lawsuit challenging Florida’s use of solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
The lawsuit...
On behalf of six students at the Sophie B. Wright Charter School in Orleans Parish, La., the SPLC sought an injunction in state court to halt disciplinary actions resulting from a senior prank. Following a water balloon fight that caused no serious injuries, the students were suspended for five...
The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) places hundreds of children in solitary confinement on any given day. The SPLC, Florida Legal Services and the Florida Justice Institute filed a federal class action lawsuit to end the use of solitary confinement in the state’s juvenile detention...
As elections approached in Alabama during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state failed to provide safe and accessible voting, potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. The SPLC and its allies filed a federal lawsuit to compel state officials to make absentee and in-person voting more...
In July 2020, federal officials issued an illegal rule that would siphon over $1 billion in emergency aid from public schools to private schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies filed a lawsuit challenging the rule issued by U.S. Secretary of Education...
North Carolina required people with previous felony convictions to pay legal financial obligations before they could vote – a practice that disenfranchised thousands of people, predominately people of color. The law was challenged by North Carolinians with prior felony convictions and advocacy...
Alabama resident Angelique Harris attempted to register to vote over the course of several years but was unlawfully denied by her county registrars due to a failure of state law to clarify how out-of-state and federal felony convictions are to be treated for determining voting eligibility. The...
After a historic legal settlement over abusive conditions facing incarcerated transgender people in Georgia prisons, Ashley Diamond, a Black transgender woman, re-entered the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) in 2019 only to encounter similar unconstitutional conditions, sparking a lawsuit...
As Georgia voters cast early ballots in the state’s January 2021 U.S. Senate runoff elections amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a Republican Party lawsuit was filed to, among other issues, close ballot drop boxes after business hours. The SPLC filed an amicus brief with other voting rights groups in...
