During a visit to Alabama last week, many families told me that they now live in constant fear and are scared to go to work, school or the grocery store.
Last month, Luis Robledo accompanied a Spanish-speaking woman and her young son to a medical appointment in Birmingham. Both are HIV-positive and had to go in for a regular check-up. But she is an undocumented immigrant, and had become increasingly concerned about Alabama’s harsh anti-immigrant law. A couple of weeks ago, she took her child — a U.S. citizen — and moved back to Guatemala.
The ACLU is on the ground in Alabama documenting the impact of H.B. 56 on farms, families and schools. We're finding evidence of racial profiling and discrimination.
This week we got the welcome news that the state of Alabama will not appeal a ruling ordering a new trial for ACLU client Montez Spradley, who was sentenced to death despite inadequate and very weak evidence, after his trial judge rejected the jury’s 10-2 vote for a life sentence .
As we’ve written before, Spradley, a young African-American man, has always vigorously maintained his innocence in the 2004 murder of a 58-year-old white grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. The prosecution's case against Spradley was alarmingly thin and riddled with inconsistencies, and in ordering a new trial the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found that much of it was "improperly admitted."
