In Alabama’s criminal justice system, wealth can be synonymous with freedom, and lack of wealth can mean incarceration. That’s wealth-based justice, and it’s unconstitutional. Hundreds of defendants, including Bradley Hester, Ray Charles Schultz, and Randall Parris, are routinely jailed pretrial due to their inability to afford a predetermined bail bond required for release. This system disregards the ramifications of unconstitutional pretrial detention for individuals and families, which include presumption of innocence, economic and emotional hardship, and potential loss of one’s job. We along with partners intervened in a federal class action lawsuit which seeks to end this unlawful detention scheme, and calls on Cullman County to instead implement fair, efficient, alternative conditions of release that are not based on how much money someone has.

Stephanie Hicks was a police officer working for the West Alabama Narcotics Task Force. Just eight days after Agent Hicks returned to work after her maternity leave, she was demoted to a position as a patrol officer.

On July 28, 2017, the U.S. District Court blocked an Alabama law that imposed severe barriers on a minor’s ability to get abortion care in the state. The law, which was passed in 2014, applied to minors who sought a judicial bypass of the state’s parental consent requirement for abortion. It went beyond any other parental consent law in the country and forced minors seeking abortion care to stand trial if they were unable to obtain a parent’s consent for the procedure.

The ACLU is representing four people being sued for defamation because they exercised their right to free speech and voiced opposition to a coal ash landfill in their small town. The defendants, all residents of Uniontown, Alabama — a poor, predominantly Black town with a median per capita income of around $8,000 — are being sued for $30 million by Georgia-based Green Group Holdings because the residents are fighting the hazardous coal ash that the company keeps in a residential landfill. The ACLU asked a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. In February 2017, the parties reached a settlement in which the company dropped the lawsuit and agreed to better environmental protections at the landfill.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Alabama, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Planned Parenthood Southeast, have filed a lawsuit challenging a state law that places onerous and medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers and would force most of the state’s clinics to stop providing abortions.