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, …
A lawsuit filed Monday in Louisiana alleges the state is negligent in guaranteeing Constitutional rights of poor people by not properly funding or maintaining the public defender system. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and two other law firms filed a class action suit Monday in Baton Rouge against Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards …
A class-action civil rights lawsuit filed late Tuesday alleges that more than a dozen St Louis-area municipalities are engaged in the discriminatory and unconstitutional practice of jailing people for unpaid debts in order to raise state revenue, a situation the suit says amounts to a system of modern-day “debtors’ prisons” that primarily affects poor residents of color. The suit alleges a …
A very painful episode in the Los Angeles, California Mexican-American community is the subject of a documentary airing Monday, Feb. 1 on PBS. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, some Mexican and Mexican-American women who were admitted to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center for an emergency caesarian faced an agonizing choice. If they wanted painkillers, or if they wanted to proceed with …