Supreme Court Term 2023-2024

Mieles v. Ronald McDonald House of the Greater Hudson Valley et al. challenges a discriminatory housing policy that bans individuals with a wide range of convictions from critical housing without consideration of the nature, severity, or recency of the conviction or incident, or an individualized assessment. Such policies unjustly and disproportionately exclude Latine and Black people from housing, in violation of the Federal Housing Act and New York State Human Rights law.

On January 29, 2024, the ACLU and the ACLU of New Jersey filed an amicus brief in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in support of Plaintiff Nijeer Parks. The brief argues that law enforcement’s wrongful arrest of Mr. Parks due to police reliance on unreliable facial face recognition technology violated Mr. Parks’s constitutional rights.

On January 24, 2024, the ACLU and ACLU of Florida filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit supporting HM Florida-ORL, which operates the restaurant and bar Hamburger Mary’s in Orlando, in its lawsuit alleging that a Florida law infringes upon minors’ First Amendment rights by prohibiting them from attending drag performances.

This case seeks to hold Detroit police accountable for the wrongful arrest of our client due to officers’ reliance on a false match from face recognition technology.

Abdullahi Khalif Noor is a Somali refugee, who was a cab driver living in Seattle when convicted of rape and assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has always maintained his innocence. He challenged his convictions in Washington state courts, arguing that prosecutors had suppressed evidence of his innocence in violation of due process and Brady v. Maryland.   Unsuccessful in the Washington state courts, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court. He was again unsuccessful, and sought to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ordinarily, when a party loses in federal district court they can immediately appeal the decision. But Mr. Noor was barred from doing so because he had not obtained a document Congress has required habeas petitioners receive from federal courts before they can appeal since 1908 — then called a certificate of probable cause, but now called a certificate of appealability (COA).