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