On February 21, 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin, and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP filed a class-action lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. This lawsuit challenged the Milwaukee Police Department’s unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program that targeted tens of thousands of people without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, primarily driven by racial profiling.

This case concerns the First Step Act of 2018, in which Congress made major reductions to the mandatory minimum sentences for certain federal drug and firearm offenses. These changes result in sentences many decades shorter than were required under the previous laws. The question in this case was whether people who were initially sentenced prior to enactment of the First Step Act, but whose sentences were vacated and remanded for resentencing after enactment of the law, can benefit from its major reductions in applicable mandatory minimums. For defendants like Mr. Carpenter, who was originally sentenced to a draconian 116 years in prison as a result of the pre-First Step Act mandatory minimums, applying the First Step Act can mean the difference between dying in prison and having the opportunity to eventually go free. Unfortunately, although there is a split among federal courts of appeals on this question, the Supreme Court denied cert in this case in February 2024.

This case pending before the Montana Supreme Court asks, among other things, whether the claims of sixteen youth plaintiffs challenging Montana energy policy present a political question under the Montana Constitution. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the ACLU of Montana, filed an amicus brief arguing that the claims do not present a political question and, moreover, that state courts should not wholesale adopt the federal political questions doctrine.

In this case, the Iowa Supreme Court considered when rap lyrics are admissible evidence in criminal trials. The State sought further review of a court of appeals decision which reversed the defendant's criminal convictions and remanded for a trial based on errors in the admission of evidence. Together with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project and the ACLU of Iowa, the State Supreme Court Initiative filed an amicus brief arguing that such evidence should usually be excluded because it is rarely probative and yet creates a high risk of prejudice to the defendant. The Court ultimately reversed the court of appeals conviction, although somewhat attempted to limit the admission of the rap video to the facts of the case.