Montez Spradley, who was sentenced to death in Alabama for a 2004 murder he did not commit, was released from prison in September 2015. He had spent 9.5 years behind bars, 3.5 years of them on death row. He is 32 years old.

The Alabama state legislature passed a draconian anti-immigrant law in June, 2011, the toughest of several state laws modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070. Like the Arizona law, SB 56 authorized police to ask for proof of citizenship or immigration status during a traffic stop based on “reasonable suspicion” that the person was an undocumented immigrant. The law went even further than Arizona’s, with provisions that required public school officials to verify the immigration status of children and their parents, that made it a crime for undocumented immigrants to solicit work, and criminalized Alabamians for ordinary, everyday interactions with undocumented individuals like renting a mobile home or offering a ride.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Alabama have filed a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of April and Ginger Aaron-Brush of Birmingham. The couple was wed in Massachusetts, but their marriage is not recognized in their home state.

A federal judge has ruled that the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) can no longer discriminate against prisoners living with HIV by housing them separately from all other prisoners and categorically denying them equal access to prison rehabilitative programs, according to a landmark decision in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU National Prison Project, the AIDS Project, and the ACLU of Alabama. This ruling paves the way for prisoners living with HIV to have access to needed and appropriate services, and to the classes and training available to other prisoners.

Whether the defendant’s failure to file a timely appeal in state court should bar all subsequent federal court review of his death sentence when the reason for the missed deadline was that Alabama officials made no effort to inform him of an adverse decision from the state courts after it was returned unopened by his lawyers’ former law firm.