One Year of Public Accountability
Friends and supporters,
It's been an incredible first year for Public Accountability. We formally came into existence in December 2020, but didn't officially launch until May 2021. In the eight months since then, we:
won a $750,000 settlement for an inmate who was brutally beaten in jail;
represented parents and teachers in Newberg, Oregon, who were sued by far-right extremists on the school board;
filed merits briefs in two cases in the federal courts of appeals;
published ten issues of our newsletter, Clearly Established;
were invited to discuss our work on a panel with DeRay McKesson and an episode of Your Neighborhood Black Friends;
worked on cases with both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Oregon;
held two continuing legal education (CLE) courses to educate lawyers on how to fight qualified immunity;
and we have more to come in 2022!
Thank you for being part of this work and making it possible. Your support—from donating to getting out the word to simply reading our emails and cheering us on—made this all possible. If we can accomplish this much in our first year, just imagine what we can do as we move forward together.
With gratitude,
Athul K. Acharya
Founder & Executive Director
Public Accountability
PS: If you've been missing Clearly Established, read on for a little mini-issue!
Clearly Established #11
The end of the year brought a smorgasbord of unexpected new work for us here at Public Accountability, so the newsletter had to take a bit of a back seat. We'll get back to regular issues soon—we promise. But in the meantime, let's talk about that new work!
In El Paso County, CO, jail deputies brutally beat a handcuffed and incapacitated inmate, fracturing his skull. He sued them and managed to defeat two motions for qualified immunity—one without lawyers and another after he found counsel. On the eve of trial, the deputies took an appeal to the Tenth Circuit—which is where we came in. We argued that the appeal was frivolous—and won—meaning the deputies suddenly were going to have to try a case they thought they’d postponed for two years. They quickly came to the negotiating table after that. Our client walked away with $750,000, the largest excessive-force settlement in the history of El Paso County.
In Newberg, OR, far-right extremists took over the school board and banned Black Lives Matter and Pride symbols. Some parents and teachers, concerned about this new and radical direction in their schools, joined a Facebook group to discuss ways they could hold their elected school-board directors accountable. In retaliation, the Board’s conservative majority sued four parents and teachers—supposedly for “doxxing” them, even though in each case they had actually doxxed themselves. (For example: One director told the world he worked at Selectron Technologies on his campaign website, but then sued our client for repeating that information in the Facebook group.) We teamed up with the ACLU of Oregon and prominent local civil-rights lawyers to fight back. Read our anti-SLAPP motion here.
That’s it for this week. Please feel free to send this newsletter to any friends or family who might find it interesting. If you got this from a friend, you can sign up to receive future issues here.
When we’re not writing this newsletter, we litigate cases in the federal courts of appeals. If you want to support that important work, you can do so here.
Thanks for reading.
