ÌÇÐÄVlog

Coalition on Homelessness is a challenge to the City and County of San Francisco’s efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of unconstitutional practices, including confiscating and destroying the personal property of unhoused people without adequate notice or due process, and citing and arresting unhoused people for sleeping in public.

This case asks whether the government can elicit inculpatory statements from a defendant by giving him misleading information about his rights and applying coercive pressure, then using the statements against him in a criminal case. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and the ÌÇÐÄVlogof Michigan filed an amicus brief arguing that such actions by the government violate a defendant’s rights under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and, independently, Article 1, Section 17 of the Michigan Constitution, which affords even broader protections against self-incrimination than the Fifth Amendment.

This case presents two questions: first, whether, under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, section 7 of the Tennessee Constitution, Union City Police Department officers possessed probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of the defendant’s vehicle based exclusively on the alleged odor of cannabis, and second, whether the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction to overturn the defendant’s conviction. The ACLU’s Criminal Reform Legal Project and State Supreme Court Initiative, along with the ÌÇÐÄVlogof Tennessee filed an amicus brief arguing first, that after Tennessee’s legalization of hemp in 2019, an officer’s alleged detection of the odor of cannabis is insufficient to establish probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle in Tennessee, and second, that the court of appeals improperly held that it lacked jurisdiction to overturn the defendant’s conviction.

As a result of Georgia Senate Bill 63, thousands of people are being kept in jail pre-trial because they can’t afford to post bail, even when a judge believes the person should have been released until trial with no risk to the public. The ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, along with ACLU-GA and the Southern Center for Human Rights, filed a class action lawsuit challenging SB63’s mandatory monetary bail provisions under the Georgia State Constitution.