The SPLC filed a petition seeking the “immediate and unconditional release ” of a 15-year-old boy who was illegally held in a Louisiana juvenile prison without a court hearing required under state law.
A Madison Parish judge committed the child to the secure custody of the Office of...
The North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has revoked the licenses of hundreds of thousands of people simply because they cannot afford to pay traffic fines and court costs. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit seeking to end the practice, which disproportionately harms African-American...
State employees at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as “Angola,” routinely and systemically failed to properly assess, diagnose and treat the medical problems of people who are incarcerated at the largest prison in the state, which for years has had the world’s highest rate of...
On April 3, 2018, journalist Manuel Duran was unlawfully arrested by Memphis police while reporting live at a peaceful demonstration connected with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Even after the charges were dropped, local officials handed him over to U.S...
Florida’s Constitution Revision Commission, an entity created every 20 years to revise the state’s laws, attempted to place a constitutional amendment on the state’s 2018 ballot that would have eliminated the duties of school boards to regulate public schools in their districts, including...
After the U.S. Department of Education failed to fully comply with public records requests that could shed light on the gun lobby’s possible role in the department not standing in the way of states and school districts using federal funds to arm educators, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the...
The Martinez family was traveling along a Mississippi highway in 2017 – on their way to a vacation – when a sheriff’s deputy stopped them for no apparent reason. The family was then detained by the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office for approximately four hours based solely on the fact that they...
Charles Gresham has had trouble finding and keeping work because of issues related to his seizures. He received a notice from the state of Arkansas that if he did not meet a requirement to work 20 hours a week, he would lose his Medicaid coverage. When he tried to report his work hours to the...
Peter Sean Brown was illegally detained in Florida’s Monroe County jail for deportation despite his repeated pleas to authorities that he was a U.S. citizen and the county’s own jail file showing that he was born in Philadelphia. The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Brown, whose Fourth...
In 2018, the Duval County School Board in Florida began hiring armed civilians, known as “school safety assistants,” to patrol the district’s elementary schools. The program threatened the safety of thousands of students by opening the door for inadequately trained assistants – who are not law...
