This week has brought some welcome news for NCLEJ.

Plaintiffs challenging debtors’ prison practices of the City of Montgomery and Judicial Correction Services (JCS), a private contractor that extracted payment of traffic fines and fees on behalf of the City, scored important wins in a July 7 decision from the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.

At issue is the widespread practice in Alabama, and other states, of disproportionately targeting low-income people for minor traffic offenses, assessing fines, including the automatic fines levied against those who exercise their rights to challenge the tickets and then, ultimately, imprisoning those who are unable to pay.

Plaintiffs in the case, McCullough v. City of Montgomery, include Angela McCullough and Marquita Johnson, whose experiences with former Municipal Judge Les Hayes were recently featured in the first installment of a Reuters investigative series on judicial misconduct.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that significant portions of the Plaintiffs’ lawsuits can proceed to trial on claims for damages for violations of federal constitutional due process, equal protection rights and state tort law prohibiting false imprisonment and abuse of process. NCLEJ represents the plaintiffs with our co-counsel Hank Sanders and Faya Toure of Chesnut Sanders & Sanders, LLC, Martha Morgan, and Dentons. Read our full press release here.

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On July 9th, NCLEJ and our partners at the Empire Justice Center, the Legal Aid Society, Greater Hartford Legal Aid, and the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute filed an amicus brief in support of the Plaintiffs in District of Columbia et.al. v. U.S.D.A. The litigation, filed by fourteen state attorneys general, the City of New York and the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, challenges harsh work rules finalized by the Trump administration late last year. In March, the Court ordered that implementation of the work rules be halted during the litigation. The Plaintiffs now seek to permanently block the rules.

Copious data, research, and prior agency experience show that work rules do nothing to help alleviate poverty and do not actually transition people into stable jobs. Instead, the rules cut off assistance from people who desperately need assistance and provide no safety net upon which struggling families can fall back when their benefits are cut off.

The new ABAWD rules drastically expand the number of people who are subject to the harsh work requirements, take away discretion needed by states to respond quickly to economic downturns, and put hundreds of thousands of people across the country at risk of losing essential support in the middle of a historic public health and economic crisis. NCLEJ filed comments opposing these rules before they were finalized, and we continue to oppose them now.

Our amicus brief highlights the difficulties SNAP recipients in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts will face if the rules are allowed to go into effect. To read our brief, click here.

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We are also pleased to announce that Saima Akhtar will join the legal staff at NCLEJ in August. Saima comes from the Empire Justice Center where she has worked for twelve years doing state and federal court litigation on behalf of individual, class and organizational clients. She has worked extensively in the area of public benefits, including on cases with NCLEJ and is widely recognized for her expertise in the area. Prior to attending law school, she worked at Domestic Abuse Intervention Services of Madison, Wisconsin, first as a shelter advocate and later as a shelter services coordinator. She is a graduate of Albany Law School and holds a Masters of Public Policy Degree from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at the University of Albany and dual bachelor degrees in the History of Science and Public Welfare. We are thrilled to have her with us and look forward to her joining us in this particularly challenging time.