Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit demanding that the CIA, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State release a 6,900-page report of a comprehensive investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture, and other abuse of detainees. The investigative report was produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and describes horrific human rights abuses by the CIA. It also chronicles the agency’s evasions and lies to Congress, the White House, the media, and the public. In May 2015, a federal district court dismissed the case, finding that the full torture report is a congressional record and therefore not subject to FOIA, which applies only to executive branch records. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s judgment in May 2016. In November 2016, we filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court, asking it to hold that the full report is subject to FOIA — so it may be released to the public. In April 2017, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The outcome was a major setback for government transparency and accountability.

Ledell Lee has filed a motion in federal court asking the court reopen his case due to the breakdown in counsel over his decades of review, particularly the failure of counsel to bring evidence of his intellectual disability. Lee has presented new evidence showing that he has fetal alcohol syndrome disorder, significant brain damage, and intellectual disability. These facts were concealed by the line of counsel plagued with conflicts of interests, substance abuse, serious mental illness, and gross incompetence.

Ledell Lee, an innocent man who had been on Arkansas death row since 1995, was executed on April 20, 2017, despite overwhelming evidence that he was intellectually disabled, evidence that had never been considered by any court due to two decades of repeated failures by the attorneys charged with protecting his life. In 2002, the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for people with intellectual disabilities, noting that they “in the aggregate face a special risk of wrongful execution,” Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304.

The ACLU filed habeas petitions on behalf of more than two dozen families who fled horrific violence and persecution in Central America and whose applications for asylum in the United States were denied after a cursory expedited review.