Tags Share In January 2024, ICE officers at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana pepper-sprayed hundreds of detainees who were participating in a peaceful demonstration and hunger strike. Guards retaliated by indiscriminately deploying pepper spray – an attack that blatantly violated individuals’ rights under the U.S. constitution, federal and state law, and ICE’s own legal standards…
Tags Share In a brief video, Anthony Enriquez, Vice President of U.S. Advocacy and Litigation, urges an end to solitary confinement in United States prisons and detention centers. The United States locks up over 122,000 people in solitary on any given day, at odds with international legal guidance like the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules…
Tags Share Propelled by human rights groups and grassroots organizations, the campaign to end the torture of solitary confinement is gaining national momentum. In December, Senator Edward J. Markey introduced the End Solitary Confinement Act, historic legislation that would end solitary confinement in federal prisons, jails, and detention centers, with limited exceptions. Last summer, Congresswoman…
Tags Share BOSSIER CITY, LA, December 18, 2023 —Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana (ACLU-LA) have filed a criminal appeal on behalf of their client Anthony Monroe, after Mr. Monroe was convicted of battery of a police officer and resisting an officer. The appeal, filed on November…
Tags Share Reckon Media highlights a new report co-authored by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights that documents years of abuse and torture at Winn Correctional Center in Lousiana. Staff attorney Sarah Decker comments on Winn’s history of human rights violations, including abusive use of solitary confinement. “We very frequently see ICE weaponizing solitary confinement,” she…
Tags Share Speaking with Verite News, our staff attorney Sarah Decker calls on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to shut down Winn Correctional Center, a Louisiana ICE detention center with a long history of violence, abuse and negligence.
To understand the causes is not to permit the result. No man has the right to wantonly menace the safety and well-being of his neighbors. All citizens have the right to security in the streets of their community—in Birmingham or in Los Angeles. And it is the duty of all public officials to keep the…
Guns and bombs cannot build— cannot fill empty stomachs or educate children, cannot build homes or heal the sick. But these are the ends for which men establish and obey government; they will give their allegiance only to governments which meet these needs.
In the words of the old saying, every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
Legal services, particularly defense in criminal cases, are not like houses or automobiles where those with more money can buy better products without affecting the basic functioning of society. When one defendant cannot afford a complete defense, justice is being rationed.
Share