Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

This case gets at the very heart of our right to a jury trial. Traditionally and historically, the right to a jury trial has promised that a person could not be punished unless every single person in a group of one’s peers agreed, by jury vote, that that was the just outcome. However, Florida feels differently. When it comes to the death penalty, Florida is one of only two states that has decided that the “right to a trial by jury” does not guarantee that a person will be sentenced to death by a unanimous jury. Instead, in Florida, a person can be sentenced to die even if four people on their jury think they should live. The state requires just eight of twelve jury votes for a death sentence, which not only disproportionately affects people of color, but the very ideals at the heart of the rights of citizenship.

The ACLU, ACLU of Missouri, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America are representing Missouri’s two Planned Parenthood providers. Following the passage of Amendment 3, the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, filed suit to restore abortion access in the state. The suit seeks to enjoin Missouri’s numerous abortion bans and countless burdensome, medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion that do not improve care or protect patient health. If the requested preliminary relief is granted, Planned Parenthood’s health centers would be able to begin providing abortion in Missouri once more — restoring access to this constitutionally protected health care.

On December 5, 2024, the ACLU and the ACLU of Michigan filed an amicus brief in Woodruff v. Oliver, a wrongful arrest lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, arguing that the Detroit Police Department’s (DPD) reliance on flawed facial recognition technology (FRT) impermissibly tainted the investigation and failed to establish probable cause for the plaintiff’s arrest.

Every night, thousands of veterans sleep without shelter on the streets of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs owns hundreds of acres of land in prime West Los Angeles—land directly adjacent to a VA medical facility that was once earmarked to house veterans, but today is instead home to private school sports fields and an oil well.   In November 2022, a group of unhoused veterans and a non-profit organization filed suit alleging that the Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”) failed to provide adequate housing and health care to veterans with severe disabilities in Los Angeles. These failures have significantly undermined veterans’ abilities to access the benefits they are entitled to by law, leaving many stranded on the streets after serving our country. The veterans sued the VA under the Rehabilitation Act, a federal statute that prohibits federal agencies from discriminating against people with disabilities. As a remedy, the plaintiffs seek the construction of significant units of permanent supportive housing on the   The VA argued that a provision of the Veterans’ Judicial Review Act (“VJRA”)— a federal statute that prohibits federal district courts from second-guessing VA’s individualized benefits determinations—bars federal district courts from hearing the veterans’ Rehabilitation Act claims. Should the court accept this position, it would deprive veterans of a meaningful opportunity to have their rights under the Rehabilitation Act and other generally applicable nondiscrimination statutes enforced.