Court Cases

In our client Ryan Morris’s case, the sentencing judge violated his jury trial right by imposing a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence based on facts found at sentencing, instead of facts submitted to a jury or admitted by Morris when he pled guilty.

The ACLU of Massachusetts filed an amicus brief in March 2015 urging the state Supreme Judicial Court to hold that, when law enforcement has probable cause to obtain a warrant to look for a particular type of file on a cell phone, it should not be permitted to search the entire phone.

This state lawsuit sought the release of documents about the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council's SWAT team and other military-style tactics.

The ACLU has challenged "mandatory" immigration detention and the procedures determining whether noncitizens will be detained or released during immigration proceedings.

ACLU of Massachusetts suit in federal court seeks to block two anti-panhandling ordinances enacted in 2013 by the City of Worcester.

Can a defendant can be forced to decrypt their electronic files?

In June 2014, three groups—Prisoners' Legal Services, the Center for Public Representation and the ACLU of Massachusetts—joined with the law firm WilmerHale to file a class-action suit challenging the imprisonment of Massachusetts women who are civilly committed for addictions to drugs or alcohol.

In a landmark ACLU of Massachusetts case, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2014 that Massachusetts citizens have a constitutionally protected interest in cell site location information.