Washington, D.C.

Key Cases

• Thompson v. Clark (U.S. Supreme Court & Second Circuit Court of Appeals)

  Police Abuse

  Can a police officer who frames an innocent person be held accountable in court? Before the MacArthur Justice Center won the landmark Supreme Court decision in Thompson v. Clark, the answer across most of the country was no: Once the innocent person got the false charges against them dismissed, the police officer who fabricated or falsified evidence against them was immune from a civil lawsuit. We took that issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won.

• Ballentine v. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

  Right to Protest

  Our clients, Brian Ballentine, Catalino Dazo, and Kelly Patterson, are members of the “Sunset Activist Collective,” an activist group in Las Vegas. As part of their activist activities, the group writes protest messages critical of the police in chalk on the sidewalks in front of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police headquarters and the state courthouse....

• Hoever v. Marks et al.

  Advocating for the Rights of the Incarcerated

  Throughout the summer of 2013, several correctional officers threatened Conraad Hoever with physical violence and death in retaliation for filing grievances. One officer told him that officers had “been killing inmates here for a long time and nobody can do a damn thing,” and that if he continued to write grievances, the officers would “starve...

• Timpa v. Dillard

  Police Abuse

  Instead of being helping Tony Timpa after he called the 911 due to a mental health crisis, responding officers from the Dallas Police Department (DPD) applied bodily force to his chest until he asphyxiated and suffocated him to death. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting to ensure police departments, like DPD, are answerable for their systemic failures to protect and serve the communities they swore an oath to instead of shielding officers from culpability with the qualified immunity doctrine.   

• People v. Silas

  Access to Courts

  UPDATE: The MacArthur Justice Center secured a major victory in the California Court of Appeal. The court vacated four convictions in a double homicide case and remanded for a new trial, concluding that the prosecution violated Batson when it struck Crishala Reed from the jury pool. This victory should send a message to prosecutors everywhere: Targeting someone...

• Garza v. Idaho (U.S. Supreme Court)

  Access to Courts

  On February 27, 2019, the MacArthur Justice Center obtained a major victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in Garza v. Idaho. In an opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court recognized that a criminal defendant has the constitutional right to an appeal where his defense attorney improperly forfeited it, and that this right...

• Williams v. Louisiana (U.S. Supreme Court)

  Wrongful Convictions

  Corey Williams was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder as an intellectually disabled 16-year old child, and spent 20 years in Louisiana prison for a crime that he did not commit. We represented Mr. Williams in a petition for certiorari before the U.S. Supreme Court and obtained his immediate release from prison through a settlement with the State of Louisiana.

• Trump v. State of Hawaii (Amicus Brief)

  Immigrants' Rights

  At every stage in the litigation against that ban (which the President had often characterized as the “Muslim Ban”) the MacArthur Justice Center ensured that judges had before them a full record of President Trump’s hatred of people of the Muslim faith, his open desire to curtail their rights, and his specific, sustained promise to inhibit their entry to the United States.