On July 10, 2017, Gabriel Eduardo Olivas was having a mental health crisis in his home. His son called 911 to ask for help. Instead of sending mental health workers with the tools and experience to help Mr. Olivas, the 911 dispatcher sent armed law enforcement. The officers who arrived did not treat Mr. Olivas — instead, they killed him. Mr. Olivas was soaked in gasoline when the two officers tased him, even though another officer warned them seconds earlier that tasing him would ignite the gasoline. In other words, to prevent the mere possibility of Mr. Olivas setting himself on fire, Arlington police did it for him.

Mr. Olivas’ family sued the two officers and won in district court. Three federal appellate judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling last month, applying qualified immunity. In short, qualified immunity is a legal defense that allows police officers and other government officials to shirk legal responsibility for their actions, unless they knew their conduct would violate “clearly established law.” Though the appellate court found no constitutional violation at all — much less a clearly established one — they made the same mistake that most courts do when applying the qualified immunity doctrine: They required prior cases with virtually identical facts to guide the decision, rather than the obviousness of the harmful conduct.

There’s nothing more obviously wrong than tasing a man in crisis, doused in gasoline, knowing it will kill him. On Tuesday, we joined the family and several other groups from across the ideological spectrum — the Cato Institute, the ACLU of Texas, Americans for Prosperity, and Disability Rights Texas — in asking the full Fifth Circuit to reconsider their decision.

Specifically, we’ve asked the appellate court to reconsider in light of recent, potentially encouraging shifts at the Supreme Court about qualified immunity. The Supreme Court recently held that, in cases with “particularly egregious facts,” plaintiffs could win cases without having to rely on a previous case about the exact same conduct. In doing so, the Supreme Court overturned a Fifth Circuit decision that granted qualified immunity to corrections officers who held two incarcerated people in inhumane conditions for six days. Three months later, the court sent back yet another Fifth Circuit decision granting qualified immunity under similarly deplorable grounds (pepper spraying an incarcerated person for “no reason at all”).

Yet despite having been directly reversed not once but twice on this very issue, the Fifth Circuit again ignored the Supreme Court’s clear signal that the lower courts should no longer automatically grant qualified immunity simply because there’s no prior blueprint.

We want the appellate court to rehear this case to explain how it and other courts should apply the recent Supreme Court cases. But if the court fails to take this opportunity, the justices of the Supreme Court must act: namely, by abolishing qualified immunity. And, no matter what the federal judiciary does, Congress can and should eliminate qualified immunity immediately and on its own. States can also axe qualified immunity in their courts — Colorado already has — so that people wronged by their government can sue under state constitutions as well.

By doing away with qualified immunity, we can begin to hold officers accountable for their conduct while reimagining their role in our communities. However, that’s only a temporary solution. The real fix is to get police out of the business of responding to mental health crises entirely. The lives of people with disabilities are at stake: Police are 16 times more likely to kill someone with an untreated mental health disability, compared to someone without a disability, and people with disabilities represent between one-third to half of all people killed by police. At least one out of every four people killed by a cop in the last six years was experiencing a psychological crisis.

Police officers do not want to be in the business of providing mental health crisis response, and they shouldn’t be. Let’s leave the mental health care to the right professionals — the mental health workers and peer support workers — so we never bury another Gabriel Olivas again.

For years, North Carolina has restricted whether, when, and under what circumstances someone may obtain an abortion through a web of onerous and medically unnecessary laws. People with lower incomes seeking abortion care in North Carolina are frequently caught in a vicious cycle where delays in accessing care increase costs associated with the procedure, and increases in costs cause further, unnecessary delays. This burden is most acutely experienced by North Carolinians of color: 1 in 5 Black people, 1 in 5 Latinx people, and 1 in 4 Native American people in North Carolina are living in poverty.

Today we’re in court as part of a lawsuit the ACLU, the ACLU of North Carolina, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed in September. This lawsuit was filed on behalf of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and five abortion providers in the state to challenge five laws that restrict access to abortion.

The barriers to abortion access we are fighting to strike down include:

• a law prohibiting qualified medical professionals from providing abortion;
• a ban on the use of telehealth for medication abortions;
• a statute that places onerous, unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers but not on other similar medical offices or providers;
• a mandatory 72-hour waiting period between the patient’s consultation with their provider and when they can actually have the abortion; and
• a requirement that forces abortion providers to read a state-issued script to their patients discouraging and stigmatizing abortion care.

None of these restrictions have a medical benefit.

For example, banning qualified medical professionals, like physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and others (collectively referred to as “advance practice clinicians”), from performing abortion serves only to make accessing care more difficult — and does nothing to make it safer. Advance practice clinicians perform virtually identical procedures as abortion and prescribe medications used for abortion in other contexts, such as miscarriage care. But North Carolina categorically bans these clinicians from providing this very same care in the context of abortion without any logical justification.

Similarly, telemedicine is routinely used throughout North Carolina and is not categorically banned in any context other than medication abortion. As reaffirmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in states where it is permitted, telemedicine for medication abortion is a safe, effective, and crucial way for patients to access health care. But North Carolina law unnecessarily requires the prescribing clinician to physically hand the patient the first set of pills necessary for a medication abortion — and requires patients to travel in person to a clinical setting to pick up the medication, even though they could potentially get it by mail or at a pharmacy. There is no health or safety justification for banning the use of telemedicine for medication abortions.

North Carolina law also singles out abortion providers, subjecting them to onerous and medically unjustified requirements that no other providers of office-based medical care must meet. This interferes with — and in some cases outright prevents — the provision of abortion services.

Furthermore, the state’s 72-hour mandatory delay, one of the longest in the country, pushes patients seeking abortion care to obtain that care later in pregnancy. This delay is premised on the unsupported belief that patients are unable to make a reasoned, informed decision about their own health without state mandates. It prevents some from accessing the abortion method the patient and their doctor have determined is best for them — and others from obtaining care altogether. And while abortion is extremely safe, this delay can increase both the risks and expenses related to the procedure.

Finally, the biased counseling requirement undermines core principles of informed consent and medical ethics by requiring the same state-scripted counseling for every abortion patient, regardless of circumstance. North Carolina law already requires health care professionals to obtain informed consent before every medical procedure. But once again, the state singles out abortion — and only abortion — for additional requirements that have no medical justification.

There is only one reason for this web of laws to exist: to make it more difficult to access abortion care and further stigmatize people who need it. The laws interfere with patients’ bodily autonomy; they restrict a person’s right to decide whether and when to bear a child; and they subject people who need abortions and their health care providers to discriminatory treatment that doesn’t apply to any other medical care in the state.

The ACLU is on the frontlines fighting new laws that restrict or altogether ban abortion. But we also need to dismantle unjust laws that have been on the books for years, and that have affected abortion access for generations, like in North Carolina.

This lawsuit is also noteworthy because we’ve sued under the North Carolina Constitution. In the post-Trump era — with the concern that the balance of the Supreme Court has shifted to an anti-abortion majority — states play an especially important role in protecting the right to abortion. Lifting the restrictions will reverberate across the Southeast, ensuring abortion access for people who live in neighboring Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia, which have been increasingly hostile to abortion access.

Enough is enough. It is time to end North Carolina’s decades of attacks on reproductive freedom.

Across America, banks are disappearing, leaving behind their most vulnerable customers, many of whom are Black and low-income. Since 2013, more than 11,000 additional bank branches have shuttered. And the trend is only accelerating. Some analysts expect as many as 20,000 additional branch closures in the immediate aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Branches in majority-Black areas, in particular, were roughly 50 percent more likely to close than those in the rest of America. As a result, 63 percent of majority-Black census tracts do not have an active bank branch; 17 percent of Black Americans are unbanked; and 30 percent of Black Americans are underbanked.

With bank branches closing at an accelerating rate, we can expect the number of unbanked Americans to grow, particularly Black Americans, as well as the fees they pay. Black consumers, like low income consumers generally, are prime candidates to be exploited by the payday loan industry. “The average unbanked family with an annual income of around $25,000 will spend about $2,400 per year, almost 10 percent of its income, on financial transactions,” writes Mehrsa Baradaran in How the Other Half Banks. “This is more than these families spend on food.” Over the course of a 30-year working career, being unbanked can cost the median Black family more than $86,000 in fees, representing twice their annual income.

But America is not without recourse. We believe postal banking provides a cure to what ails our most vulnerable communities. According to the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General, the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act authorizes the agency to expand beyond money orders to other affordable services, including payroll check cashing, domestic money transfers, and bill payment. This is not a new or radical idea. A Pew survey from 2014 found that 81 percent of people who placed money orders stated that they would cash their checks at the Post Office; 79 percent would pay their bills; 71 percent would access small dollar loans; and 59 percent would utilize a reloadable prepaid card.

There is a post office in every zip code in America, including the 59 percent of zip codes that currently lack a bank branch. A substantial number of the un- and under-banked rely on their local post office for money orders, which are offered at a low cost. The Post Office is prepared to meet the unbanked where they already are.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that postal banking actually existed in the U.S. for the majority of the 20th century. Established in 1911, the Post Office offered a total savings cap at $2,500 (about $44,000 today). At its height, the Post Office held roughly 10 percent of all commercial banking. Postal banking ended in the late 1960s, largely because the American economy was expanding and the civil rights movement signaled greater inclusivity. However, the end of postal banking only led to further economic exclusion, especially for poor, rural, and BIPOC communities. Prior to the mid-1970s, check-cashing was a fringe institution that existed in only a few urban areas. But throughout the 1980s, check-cashing and payday lenders rapidly expanded across the country, growing into a $100 billion industry concentrated in counties with higher-than-average poverty rates, lower incomes, and relatively large populations of non-U.S. citizens and single parents.

And they did not come to save the poor. The average payday loan is $375 and requires an average of $500 to $600 in interest and fees. If the payday loan is insufficient, the borrower may have to rely on collateral. According to Baradaran, if they use a car as collateral, on average, they will pay $2,142 in interest on a $951 title loan. If they must resort to a pawn shop, they’ll likely receive about 20 to 30 percent of the value of the item. All of this usually happens after they have been denied for mainstream credit from a bank or other “more reputable” lender.

If that was too many numbers to follow, just watch John Oliver’s explainer on payday lending.

We expect these trends to continue as banks continue to disappear. Already, there are more payday lender storefronts and alternative financial service businesses in America than Starbucks or McDonalds. They are overwhelmingly located in banking deserts and minority neighborhoods where systemic racism has left concentrated poverty and negative wealth.

The Post Office has the largest retail footprint in the world, so it is primed to provide a solution to this growing crisis. Those essential financial services would cut into the market share of the payday lending industry and save American families, particularly Black families, thousands of dollars. That is why the ACLU is fighting for postal banking. In 2020, the Postal Service demonstrated its capacity to support free and fair elections at scale. In 2021, it should be allowed to demonstrate its capacity to help the most vulnerable communities make ends meet at a fair and affordable price.