Court Cases

The ACLU filed a complaint against Madera County for falsely re-imprisoning a man and transferring him into ICE custody.

In June, 2016, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California sued the Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) for violating state and federal law by refusing to release SUSD's Police Department student arrest and citation data. A Public Records Act request by the ACLU revealed that from 2012-2016, the SUSD police department filed 12,000 “incident reports." However, in response to the ACLU's request, the district chose to withold crucial information, like the reason for arrests and citations, and data on the youth affected. Stockton Unified was eventually forced to turn over the full student arrest data, and in June 2017, the ACLU released a report that showed a culture of over-policing at SUSD that had the harshest impact on Black students, Latinx students, and students with disabilities. Following the report, the Stockton Education Equity Coalition released a ‘Report Card’ that summarized the ACLU's analysis and provided recommendations to the District.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed suit against Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones on behalf of Black Lives Matter leaders who were unlawfully blocked from the sheriff's official Facebook page. Tanya Faison and Sonia Lewis, co-leaders of Black Lives Matter Sacramento, have been vocal critics of the sheriff and other law enforcement officials. Both had comments deleted and were blocked from the sheriff's page during a critical time of public debate about whether the sheriff's department should be subjected to outside oversight.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the ACLU Foundation and the law firm Durie Tangri LLP filed a lawsuit against the City and County of San Francisco for its police department’s racially discriminatory enforcement practices.

In 2015, the California Legislature enacted SB 227 to try to ensure that prosecutors use a public process when deciding whether to criminally charge police officers accused in shootings or other uses of excessive force, as opposed to using secret grand-jury proceedings. The Court of Appeal held that the law is unconstitutional because it conflicts the constitutional role of the grand jury. The ACLU Foundations of California supported SB 227 and has now asked the California Supreme Court to grant review in the case. 

The ACLU Foundations of California filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s Suspicious Activity Reporting program - a vast expansion of the federal government’s domestic intelligence network. The SAR program targets First Amendment-protected activity, encourages racial and religious profiling, and violates federal law. The plaintiffs are five U.S. citizens whose information has been entered into counterterrorism databases for engaging in lawful conduct.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is violating the constitutional rights of homeless people by confiscating and destroying their property in ongoing sweeps. The class-action suit seeks a permanent injunction to stop this illegal practice throughout California. 

The ACLU of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the City of Hayward and its Police Department for charging the National Lawyers Guild unlawful and excessive costs as the price of disclosing body camera footage the NLG requested under the California Public Records Act.