Court Cases

The ACLU represents all prisoners at the Broward County Jail, challenging inadequate mental healthcare. In 1995, a consent decree was approved that acknowledged that the living conditions of the inmates were unconstitutional, set a population cap for the jail, and established a system for compliance monitoring. The ACLU then joined as counsel in 2001 to oppose the Broward County Sheriff’s efforts to terminate the consent decree. In 2004, two stipulations for settlement were entered that dismissed the medical claims and narrowed the scope of monitoring. The stipulations also limited judicial oversight of the jail to issues “relating to mental health services, inmate rules and discipline, inmate safety and security, facility capacity, and inmate access to religious publication and services and access to legal material.” In 2010, a significant increase in the jail population led to overcrowding. The Court then appointed a population management expert to produce a report examining the processes and policies affecting the population at the jail. In 2014, two prisoners filed motions asserting the consent decree had been violated. In 2016, the Court held a hearing on whether to dissolve the consent decree and later preliminarily approved a settlement. Later, a 2018 report by a mental health expert described the conditions of the jail as “absolutely inhumane.” In 2018, the parties reached a comprehensive settlement agreement that would result in improvements throughout the jail’s mental-healthcare system. The settlement will result in termination of the consent decree and a dismissal of the case when the jail has maintained substantial compliance with each of the substantive provisions of the agreement for one year. In December 2020, we filed an expert report explaining the jail’s lack of compliance. Another expert report was filed in May 2023, January 2024, August 2025 and January 2026. We continue to monitor progress towards compliance and we are pleased that the jail is making progress.

Michael James Jackson was sentenced to death in May 2023. If his resentencing had taken place just one month earlier, before Florida’s capital-sentencing law changed in April 2023, eight votes for death would have meant that he lived. If the trial judge had correctly applied the amended law to apply only prospectively, as the Legislature unambiguously commanded, only a unanimous jury vote could have resulted in death. In either case, the very same eight- to-four jury vote would have saved Mr. Jackson’s life. And even this on-the-cusp vote might have tilted in favor of life if the trial court had not failed to instruct the jury that, under Florida law, a life recommendation would be binding. A continuance would have allowed the court to confirm—with model jury instructions that came out shortly after Mr. Jackson was sentenced—the arguments Mr. Jackson’s attorneys were making all along: that the jury could not be lawfully instructed that its life vote would be a mere recommendation subject to the court’s approval rather than a binding determination that the court could not modify. The ACLU is assisting in the appeal and entered appearances in September 2023. Our briefing contends that the trial court’s improvised and inaccurate jury instructions violated state law and Supreme Court precedent and that Florida’s new statute allowing non-unanimity in capital sentencing violates the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Briefing was complete in September 2024, and oral argument took place December 2024. The court issued its decision in December 2025, and we filed a motion for rehearing in January 2026.

Mr. Jones is a Black disabled man who was injured by law-enforcement use of force. On August 8, 2020, Officer Ceinski stopped Mr. Jones for a traffic infraction in Sarasota, Florida. Mr. Jones complied with the officer’s request to exit the vehicle, but had difficulty due to a disability affecting his hands. While offering his documents to the officer, Mr. Jones provided his concealed carry permit and informed the officer there was a weapon in the car. Upon seeing the weapon in the car, the officer violently restrained and choked Mr. Jones despite him standing in front of the vehicle and making no attempt to reach for the weapon. After the incident, Mr. Jones sued Officer Ceinski for violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. The district court granted summary judgment for the officer based on qualified immunity, ruling Officer Ceinski’s conduct did not violate a clearly established federal right. We filed an amicus brief in the Eleventh Circuit in December 2023, asking the court to consider an officer’s knowledge of an individual’s disability as a central aspect of determining, under Graham v. Connor and its progeny, the objective reasonableness of a police officer’s use of force. The brief also contended that the failure to consider disability in the Graham analysis disparately harms Black disabled people because they are disproportionately subjected to police use of force.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Tallahassee Bail Fund against Gwendolyn Marshall, the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller for Leon County. The lawsuit challenges Clerk Marshall’s enforcement of Florida Statute § 903.286, which improperly confiscates charitable organizations’ money to punish them for helping accused persons access their freedom. This statute violates the Eighth Amendment by allowing clerks to use cash bail to impose criminal penalties on innocent parties, such as bail funds, which deprives them of the money that makes their operation possible. Our complaint was filed in August 2022. Summary-judgment briefing was completed in February 2023. On September 28, 2023, the court denied the motions for summary judgment, permitting some claims to proceed to trial. A trial was held on February 15, 2024, and on February 20, 2024, the district court ruled in our favor, holding the state statute unconstitutional as applied to our client, the Tallahassee Bail Fund. In practical terms, this means that when the Bail Fund deposits cash with the clerk to bail a person out of jail, the clerk can no longer keep it to pay that person’s fines, fees, and court costs if they later plead guilty. Instead, that money will go back to the Bail Fund, allowing them to use it to bail another person out of jail. This ruling will reduce wealth-based detention in Leon County. The government appealed, and we then cross-appealed.