Criminal Legal System
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Speech at Academy of Trial Lawyers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The legitimate purpose of bail is to ensure that defendants appear for trial. It has been distorted into systematic injustice. Every year thousands of persons are kept in jail for weeks and even months following arrest.
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Speech at Academy of Trial Lawyers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Through most of the United States today the bail system is a cruel and illogical institution which perpetuates injustice in the name of the law. In actual practice, control is frequently in the hands of bondsmen rather than the courts.
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Bryan Stevenson
Born in 1959, Bryan Stevenson grew up in rural southern Delaware and spent his early classroom years at a “colored” elementary school. By second grade, his school was formally desegregated, but Black kids still played separately from white kids and often continued to use the back door to enter the doctor’s office. Stevenson’s father took…
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Andrea James
Attorney Andrea James has been engaged with criminal justice issues since her days as a youth worker. She is the founder and executive director of Families for Justice as Healing—a criminal justice reform organization that advocates for community wellness alternatives to incarceration, with a focus on women. She is a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow and…
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Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908, in Baltimore—his father was a railroad porter and his mother, a schoolteacher. One of his great-grandfathers had been taken as a slave from the Congo to Maryland, where he was eventually freed. Growing up in Baltimore, Marshall experienced the racial discrimination that shaped his future career. After graduating from…
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Helen Prejean
Biography: Louisiana, 1977. Brothers Patrick and Eddie Sonnier admitted mugging David LeBlanc, age seventeen, and Loretta Bourque, eighteen, one autumn night, but each blamed the other for murdering them and raping Bourque. Eddie was sentenced to life, Patrick to death by electrocution. In the summer of 1982, Sister Helen Prejean had moved into St. Thomas…
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Juan Mendez
Biography: From the time that he worked as a lawyer in Argentina in the early 1970s helping to build the modern human rights movement, Juan Méndez created a road map for others to follow in defending political cases. When he was detained by the brutal Argentine security forces, his family moved quickly to demand his…
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Violence against inmates
Tags Share Writing in The New York Times, our VP of U.S. Advocacy & Litigation Anthony Enriquez comments on the rising levels of violence against prison inmates – including those held in pretrial detention.
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RFKHR’s legal strategy to end indefinite immigration detention highlighted in habeas corpus lawsuit wins
Tags Share Every day, the United States government holds over 35,000 people in immigration detention while their immigration cases proceed. Using a nationwide network of jails and prisons located in rural communities isolated from legal assistance groups, the government cuts off immigrants’ access to lawyers and subjects thousands of people each year to prolonged detention…
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Mike Brown v. United States: Seeking justice for lethal police violence
This case seeks justice for the extrajudicial killing of Mike Brown and violations of the human rights of Mike and his mother Lezley McSpadden under the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.
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Families of Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd Reach Global Stage of Yearslong Human Rights Battle
Tags Share Earlier this summer, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights worked with the families of Mike Brown and Rekia Boyd to file a merit brief with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The brief is the latest effort for accountability and justice for the Brown and Boyd families following their loved ones’ deaths at the…
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Call to action to stop inhumane practice of solitary confinement in NC prisons
Tags Share Every day, tens of thousands of incarcerated Americans are subjected to an internationally recognized form of torture, and the horrors of it are largely hidden from public view. They spend 22 hours or more a day alone in locked cells the size of parking lot spaces, often in filthy conditions with little to…
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