An Alabama city reached a legal settlement with the Southern Poverty Law Center Tuesday to end a class action lawsuit that accused it, and its chief of police, of illegally jailing people too poor to pay fines resulting from traffic and misdemeanor offences. The City of Alexander and Chief of Police Willie Robinson were accused of jailing at least 190 impoverished people over a two-year period, …
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says the state will join Washington state’s lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s new travel ban. Schneiderman said in a statement Thursday that Trump’s new executive order is “a Muslim ban by another name.” The Trump administration says the temporary restrictions are needed to keep Americans safe. “This is dialed back, …
As deaths from painkillers and heroin abuse spiked and street crimes increased, the mayor of Everett took major steps to tackle the opioid epidemic devastating this working-class city north of Seattle. Mayor Ray Stephanson stepped up patrols, hired social workers to ride with officers and pushed for more permanent housing for chronically homeless people. The city says it has …
A year ago, candidate Donald Trump proclaimed that, if elected president, he would change the nation’s libel laws to make it easier for people like him to sue those who make false and defamatory statements about them. “One of the things I’m going to do if I win,” he promised, is “to open up our libel laws” so that when people say “purposely negative and horrible and false” things about me “we …
Today, I want to look at a case that just went to federal court, became a class action case, against private prisons, about slavery. Joining me to kind of explain what’s going on there is Glen Ford. He’s the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, and he is also the editor of the Big Lie.
This past summer, President Obama’s Department of Justice was directed to stop using private prisons. Besides having notoriously inhumane conditions, the private prison industry doesn’t really save taxpayers money—it just generates money for people who are in bed with private prisons. Trump and his racist Attorney General Jeff Sessions have already made moves to reverse course.
Software vendors behind the Unemployment Insurance Agency’s failed computer system, MiDAS, are at the center of a federal lawsuit filed Thursday. The class action suit names SAS Analytics, Fast Enterprises, and CSG Government Solutions as defendants. Three citizens who experienced unemployment woes are named as plaintiffs and are representing the thousands of people wrongly …
President Donald Trump’s budget proposal may eliminate the single greatest funder of civil legal aid in the United States, the Legal Services Corporation—a long-standing goal of Vice President Mike Pence. At the same time, Congress is working to block Americans from seeking justice on their own with the Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017. This bill was drafted to address an …
A man whose clothes caught fire after he was shot with a Taser in Chesterfield County has filed a $95 million lawsuit against the police department. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch (http://tinyurl.com/z8xm4v4), the lawsuit claims that the department has unconstitutionally misused electronic stun guns for years, using them on people in handcuffs, the mentally ill and unarmed people on …
A Milwaukee police officer stands before the remains of a bar last summer, after police there faced off with protesters following the police shooting of a black man. For decades, interactions between police and people of color in the Midwestern city have been fraught, and those encounters are the subject of a new lawsuit brought by the ACLU.AFP/Getty Imageshide caption A Milwaukee police …