Court Cases

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California is asking Del Norte, Fresno, Mendocino, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Tulare, Madera, and Shasta counties to reverse their policies of requiring payment in advance of traffic court dates, or face possible legal action. These counties are currently withholding the right to contest a traffic citation until the fines and fees for the citation are paid in full. This practice is a clear violation of due process.

TSA employees at two different airports subjected Malaika Singleton to unreasonable, discriminatory searches of her hair within a week - because she is black.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to compel the Federal Housing Finance Agency to provide details about the its relationship with the financial industry and its efforts to block municipalities from using eminent domain to prevent foreclosures.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and NCYL have charged school officials in two Humboldt County towns with intentionally discriminating against Native American and Black students by allowing the pervasive racial and sexual harassment of these students to go unchallenged.

On November 23, 2009, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and civil rights allies filed an amicus brief in Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Plaintiffs argued that MTC, the planning body for all twenty-six independent transit operators in the Bay Area, consistently under-funded AC Transit, a bus line with high minority ridership, in comparison to other transit systems like BART, with lower minority ridership.

Throughout California, thousands of people are not allowed to vote because they are on parole for such statutory felonies as drug offenses and shoplifting. And while African-Americans constitute less than 7% of California's adult population, in 2006 they were approximately 28% of all those disenfranchised as a result of being in prison or on parole for a felony. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the Impact Fund filed an amicus brief in the CA Court of Appeal in the case Legal Services for Prisoners with Children v. Bowen, outlining the breadth and implications of disproportionate disenfranchisement of people of color.