Court Cases

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.

Lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court challenging the state of California for its retention of genetic samples and profiles from people arrested but never convicted of a felony.

Complaint filed on behalf of Black students in the Visalia Unified School District who have faced ongoing racial hostility.

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 2004, the FBI conducted a “threat assessment” of long-time journalists and commentators Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris, as well as their website, Antiwar.com. In violation of the federal Privacy Act, this threat assessment compiled descriptions of the journalists’ First Amendment activities without any apparent law enforcement purpose. Attorneys at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP represented the journalists in a federal lawsuit against the FBI. Records the journalists received in response to their Freedom of Information Act claims revealed that the threat assessment was based on shoddy investigative work in addition to the apparent targeting of the journalists’ political speech. In the litigation, the FBI asserted that it was entitled to create this threat assessment because of Antiwar.com’s posting of government documents. But the First Amendment has long protected the publication of government secrets and the FBI never even suggested that the journalists or Antiwar.com had violated the law by obtaining or posting those documents.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed suit against the California Department of Corrections on behalf of three media organizations challenging the execution viewing procedure.