BREAKING: Merry Christmas to Disabled Prisoners!

Friends,

I’m interrupting your week with the best kind of news.

We just won a major victory in the Ninth Circuit in Weldeyohannes v. State of Washington.

The facts are infuriating. Our client uses a wheelchair. When guards tried to put him on a bus that wasn't accessible, he told them he couldn’t walk up the stairs. The guards—relying on what they say was a clerical error in their system—decided he was “refusing transport” and dragged him onto the bus, injuring him.

The district court believed the officers’ story that the system told them our client could walk, and so it gave them qualified immunity.

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit reversed.

In a stinging rebuke, the Court held that the officers couldn’t hide behind a computer error when Mr. Weldeyohannes’s disability was “plain and obvious” to anyone looking at him.

Why this matters: We just established that bureaucratic incompetence is not a license for brutality. Officers have to believe their eyes, not just their paperwork. And even in prison, disabled people have rights that the government must respect.

We take cases that look impossible and turn them into precedents that protect everyone. And that is exactly why I’m asking you to support us in the Give!Guide today.

Help us keep winning.

Thanks for reading,

Athul K. Acharya
Founder & Executive Director
Public Accountability

We’re challenging qualified immunity—will you join us?

Friends,

I’m sure your inboxes are clogged with Giving Tuesday emails, so I’ll keep it short:

• We’re fighting hard against qualified immunity. Within the last month, we’ve filed one brief in the U.S. Supreme Court (our first!), two in the Ninth Circuit, and one in the Oregon Supreme Court. We’ve been joined by the Cato Institute, the ACLU of Washington, and the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability. We’re playing in the big leagues.

• We’re winning. In August, we convinced the Ninth Circuit to hold that a federal prisoner could sue a nurse that refused to treat him. In October, we convinced the Ninth Circuit to deny qualified immunity to a cop who shot a student in the eye at a protest. In November, within a week after we filed our amicus brief, the Supreme Court ordered a response from the other side.

• We’re opening up new practice areas. We just filed a brief asserting a prisoner’s right to accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because police and prisons have to accommodate disabled people just like any other public agency.

• We’ve expanded our staff. We just hired our first staff attorney, Sara Rosenburg, straight from a clerkship on the First Circuit. She’s brilliant. With her help, we’re going to keep turning up the pressure—on cops, prison guards, and anyone else who violates constitutional rights.

Here's the thing: We can’t do any of this without your help. We run entirely on donations from people like you—people who care about constitutional rights, who think victims of government abuse should have their day in court, who want our public servants to be accountable to the public they supposedly serve. We run on a shoestring budget—around $300,000 a year, a small fraction of what our opponents spend on litigation. (And still we win. 😎) So whether it’s $10 or $100, your investment in our work will meaningfully help keep up the fight for civil rights. So please, consider chipping in—

Thank for reading, and happy holidays,

Athul K. Acharya
Founder & Executive Director
Public Accountability