Blog

To restrict or hinder an incarcerated client’s access to their legal advocates is to isolate them from the only way that they might achieve justice.

More than 2,000 babies are born to women who are incarcerated every year. Women who are pregnant in prison require ample support to carry their pregnancies to term. Yet, pregnant prisoners never receive the care they need during one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives.

This week is the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Celebrate Pro Bono Week with this year’s theme, “Making Justice a Reality in Our Communities.” MacArthur Justice Center has partnered with many wonderful pro bono lawyers and firms over the years, and we are grateful for each attorney’s dedication to our clients and zealous advocacy.

On today’s commemoration of World Day Against the Death Penalty, we must reckon with the truth. The death penalty serves no legal purpose. It does not deter crimes. It is inhumane, kills. innocent people, and teaches our children and future leaders that political power is more important than human life. The death penalty must end in Missouri, and across the country.

Photo: WPR In 2020, the National Registry of Exonerations published a groundbreaking study, exposing the significant and pervasive effect of state official misconduct on wrongful convictions. At the time, a reporter asked me if I was surprised by the findings. Without needing a moment to think, I responded “I’m only surprised it’s not higher.” She…

Thanks to a new collaboration between the Macarthur Justice Center and the Mississippi Department of Mental Health (MDMH), Mississippians who are incarcerated now have direct access to mental health resources and services.

MJC’s Illinois Office receives about 10 letters per week from prisoners across the county. These letters shed light into the myriad crises that besiege the criminal legal system, including racial disparities within jails and prisons, wrongful convictions, prison conditions, solitary confinement and inadequate mental and physical health treatment behind bars. Read about the major takeaways from the over 400 letters the Illinois office has received over the past 10 months.

The consent decree was announced at the site of Homan Square, a police station infamous for abuse and excessive force. The station has become a symbol of the incommunicado detention, an illegal practice whereby individuals in police custody are held without access to a phone or lawyer. Homan Square was essentially a black site for…

One year ago, the MacArthur Justice Center (MJC) published a study on the dangerous inaccuracy of ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that purports to detect the sounds and location of gunfire.

The MacArthur Justice Center represents several incarcerated transgender women in proceedings to legally change their names to conform with their gender identity. Although these state court cases are smaller than most of the cases MacArthur Justice Center typically litigates, they are important because they effect systemic change for transwomen in the Missouri Department of Corrections. …

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles. But in Missouri, it was nine years later that a federal class action lawsuit made the possibility of release a reality for those incarcerated as youths. In Miller v Alabama, the U.S Supreme Court recognized what science has long known: the…

What were you doing when at 16 years old? Getting a driver’s license? Going to school and hanging out with friends? Or planning annual family trips to countries around the world? For Michael Vincent, however, his sixteen means going to prison with the possibility that he will never be able to live a life outside…

Incommunicado detention is an oppressive police practice that occurs when police hold somebody against their will and refuse to let them contact family or a lawyer. People in incommunicado detention are at increased risk of human rights abuses, including being coerced into a false confession or beaten. In Chicago, the police department has a long…

A reporter recently asked me if I was surprised by the findings of a new study from the National Registry of Exonerations that more than half of wrongful convictions involved official misconduct. Without needing a moment to think, I responded “I’m only surprised it’s not higher.” She laughed, but I was serious. The reason, however,…

On May 25, three Minneapolis police officers held George Floyd facedown on the ground while Derek Chauvin, a fourth officer, casually knelt on his neck for eight and a half minutes. Mr. Floyd alternately begged for his life and asked for his mother until he asphyxiated. By the end of the week, news outlets reported that…

As of today, the U.S. Supreme Court is slated to consider at least eleven challenges to the qualified immunity doctrine. Last June, in an Explainer for The Appeal, Amir and I laid out what qualified immunity is and how it is one of the chief ways in which law enforcement avoids accountability for misconduct. In…

It has been one week since Cook County Public Defender Amy Campanelli stood before Cook County Chief Criminal Court Judge Leroy Martin, Jr. to argue that the “desperate times” for our nation and world demand bold action to protect the 5000 people confined in the Cook County Jail from the spread of the coronavirus—and to…

Like so many other indigenous Guatemalan women, she came to America to escape a system in which the indigenous population is marginalized and exploited and where violence against native women is so prevalent and widely accepted that the police do not even bother to fill out paperwork when reports of sexual assault are made by…

On Friday, February 21, the Supreme Court, by a predictable 5-4 vote, permitted the Department of Homeland Security to refuse entry to noncitizens who are “likely at any time to become a public charge” by utilizing SNAP, Medicaid, or other public assistance. See Wolf v. Cook Cty., Ill., No. 19A905, 2020 WL858799 (U.S. Feb. 21,…

If one could set aside Bloomberg’s ten-plus-year history of damage to marginalized communities, perhaps the criminal justice reform initiatives proposed by his campaign would feel genuine, instead of as simply Bloomberg’s latest ideological trend. If you look closely at these proposals, they mean little and will do little to end mass incarceration and the over-policing…

So wrote President Richard Millhouse Nixon. The year was 1971 and the impetus for the memo was Thower’s view that the IRS should pick targets impartially. The President, on the other hand, demanded that his personal enemies—whether politicians, reporters, Vietnam War protestors, or others—get slapped with tax audits. After getting rid of Thrower, Nixon listed…

Parole may not be not prison, but make no mistake: it is another manifestation of the carceral state. Amy Breihan, Missouri Director of MacArthur Justice Center It chains people to the criminal justice system with a confusing web of requirements and restrictions, and harshly punishes anyone who slips up. Parole terms are unnecessarily long and…

While it is certainly depressing that so many people have been wrongfully convicted in our country – a former 9th Circuit judge estimated the actual wrongful conviction rate is at least two times higher than the current statistics – the increasing rate of exoneration is historic and encouraging. Media has played a critical role in…

Recently, the MacArthur Justice Center and Korey Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Law School filed a friend of the court brief in the case of Farrar v. Raemisch. Farrar was convicted of sexually abusing a girl on the basis of her testimony. She later recanted. Farrar petitioned for habeas corpus, but a…

The vast majority of people in jail have not actually been convicted of the crime that detains them. In the hyper-controlled environment of a jail or prison, death by suicide should be 100% preventable.  What does a preventable suicide look like?  In Louisiana, where I practice, it means that in 2014, in a local jail…

Go back where you came from Donald Trump “Go back where you came from.”  “No human being” would wish to live in your Congressional district, the place you call home. This is about as mean as it gets.  Actually, it’s beyond mean.  When the President openly and unapologetically engages in hate speech, all that’s worst…

…[at least] one million people have been sexually assaulted in the Nation’s prisons over the last 20 years. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stevens In 2015 alone, correctional administrators reported 24,661 allegations of sexual victimization in prisons, jails and other adult correctional facilities–and this only represents allegations that were actually reported. The actual number of incidents…

Over 2.3 million individuals in the United States are living with chronic hepatitis C – an infection of the liver which, left untreated, can lead to (among other things) liver cancer, kidney disease, and death. According to the CDC, hepatitis C kills more Americans than any other infectious disease. Chronic hepatitis C (hep C) is…

At 18 years old, Tyquine was imprisoned.  Takeisha resolved to stay in contact with her son throughout his incarceration and to fight for him as best she could. Takeisha could not then have imagined the nightmare that lay ahead of her, her son, and their family.  Over the next few years, Tyquine would descend into…

Strawberry is a transgender woman who for the majority of her incarceration was housed in men’s prisons. While in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), she was subjected to extreme, unrelenting sexual violence and abuse by other prisoners, by guards, and by the administration charged with keeping her safe. When she reported…

The mere mention of Mississippi conjures up thoughts and images of racial injustice and violence. From Emmitt Till to the war over integration here at the University of Mississippi to “Mississippi Burning” to decades of voting rights litigation to last month’s opinion of the United States Supreme Court describing the all-too-familiar practice of a Mississippi…

As it happened, I was sitting for the bar examination in Jackson that month, just 20 miles from the Raymond courthouse. Two years later, I went to the Mississippi State Penitentiary to introduce myself to Mr. Pinkney as the lawyer for his appeal. I’d studied the transcript and it was clear to me that the…

Ordinary people—whether they’re doctors, lawyers, or construction workers—are expected to follow the law. If they violate someone else’s legal rights, they can be sued and required to pay for the injuries they’ve caused. Under the doctrine of qualified immunity, public officials are held to a much lower standard. They can be held accountable only insofar…

When a vulnerable person has been crushed by the machinery of the criminal justice system, where power has been exercised with callous indifference, where there is a wrong that needs to be made right and when, as sometimes happens, there is no other lawyer or firm willing and able to take the case—we hear a call to action.