NACDL

@chrisgeidner.bsky.social

6 Aug

BIG Fourth Amendment win. "Tower dumps are per se unconstitutional general warrants," U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves held last night in Mississippi. The court relied on Chatrie and Smith, landmark NACDL Fourth Amendment Center victories. Read the ruling: www.nacdl.org/getattachmen...

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Chris Geidner

BREAKING: SCOTUS rejects Trump admin's request to allow it to end gender-affirming medical care in prisons — a significant, if tentative, rejection of one of the admin's most extreme anti-trans arguments. Only Thomas and Alito noted they would have granted the stay. More to come: www.lawdork.com

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FAMM Foundation

@famm.org

'The Vanishing Trial,' a powerful documentary by @famm.org and @nacdl.org , is now streaming on Kanopy! The best part? You can watch it for free—just sign up through your local library or university. https://pulse.ly/brdibpolbo #VanishingTrial

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apnews.comTrying to execute Christa Pike again would push into uncharted legal territory, experts sayAfter Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike survived an execution attempt it's unclear whether the state will try again.

1/6 Christa Pike survived Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her on Sept. 30. Can the state try again? Experts tell AP it would push into uncharted legal territory. Today's wire story:

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1/ The Pentagon plans to carry out the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan in public and stream it live. NACDL condemns it as an affront to human dignity on legal ground no U.S. court has ever tested, and renews its call to end the death penalty. 🧵

9/ Owen: "NACDL opposes the death penalty in all circumstances… We call on the administration to abandon this execution, and we renew our call to end capital punishment. No person, however reviled, is the government's to kill as a spectacle."

nacdl.orgNACDL - News Release ~ Livestreamed ExecutionNation’s Criminal Defense Bar: Livestreaming an Execution Is an Affront to Human Dignity and Without Precedent in U.S. History – Washington, DC (Oct. 9, 2026) – NACDL urges the administration to aband...

10/ NACDL's full statement:

7/ Wayne: "When South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad in April 2025, his lawyers, citing a forensic pathologist's review of the autopsy, said the shooters largely missed his heart, leaving him conscious and in pain for close to a minute. Now imagine that broadcast to the world."

8/ Wayne: "Guatemala broadcast executions on live television in the 1990s… Guatemala has carried out no execution since 2000. Today, even the regimes that still kill in public, including Iran, the Taliban, and North Korea, do not stream it live. This proposal would stand alone."

5/ NACDL Executive Director Lisa M. Wayne: "Mr. Hasan represented himself, called no witnesses, presented no mitigation, and made no argument for his own life… Here, no one did… in a capital case the cost of getting it wrong is irreversible."

6/ Wayne: "Courts have upheld the state's power to keep cameras out and have found no right to televise an execution. No U.S. court has ever confronted the reverse: a government that chooses to broadcast one itself in real time."

3/ Owen: "This nation knows what public killing looks like: crowds at the gallows, photographs of the dead sold as souvenir postcards, and at its worst, the racial terror of thousands of Black Americans lynched as spectacle."

4/ Owen: "Nidal Hasan is a Muslim American of Palestinian descent. Livestreaming his death makes it look less like justice than vengeance… The state should give no one cause to see it that way."

2/ NACDL President C. Melissa "Missy" Owen: "The government is planning to kill a man on camera for the country to watch in real time… We moved executions behind prison walls to leave that history behind."

therecord.mediaOklahoma judge’s Flock ruling shows the power of Supreme Court’s digital evidence decisionHow a recent Supreme Court decision on geofencing influenced a federal judge to toss a sheriff's Flock camera evidence in a drug trafficking case.

1/6 A federal judge in Oklahoma threw out Flock license-plate-reader evidence, ruling a warrantless search of a month of a driver's movements unconstitutional — citing June's Supreme Court Chatrie decision. First of its kind:

5/6 Thaxter: the ruling "correctly recognized that Chatrie holds that our location history is constitutionally protected and a warrant is required to track our physical movements." The parallels between cellphone and plate-reader records, he said, "practically leap off the page."

6/6 What's next: legal experts expect many more challenges like this across the country as Chatrie reshapes how courts treat digital location tracking. NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center — which helped litigate Chatrie — is at the center of that fight.

3/6 Why it's a big deal: for years, courts let police run plate-reader searches without a warrant, reasoning public roads carry no privacy. Hill broke from that — one of the first federal rulings that searching historic ALPR data can violate the Fourth Amendment, built directly on Chatrie.

4/6 Sidney Thaxter, senior litigator at NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center, on why it matters: "ALPR networks run against us all even if we have not committed a crime and allow police to retroactively track our whereabouts with the press of a few buttons."

2/6 The stop: a Tulsa County deputy pulled over Melisa Kyle mainly for a California plate, then used Flock's national network to pull 50 sightings of her car across a month. Judge Sara Hill called it "indiscriminate mass surveillance," a warrantless search — and suppressed the evidence.

1/6 Christa Pike survived Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her on Sept. 30. Can the state try again? Experts tell AP it would push into uncharted legal territory. Today's wire story:

5/6 Experts call it uncharted territory. One death-penalty lawyer argues a second attempt, after she already suffered the drugs, could be torture barred by the Eighth Amendment. The clearest off-ramp, another says, is for the governor to commute her sentence.

nacdl.orgNACDL - News Release ~ Christa PikeNation’s Criminal Defense Bar: Botched Execution of Christa Pike Exposes the Moral Failure of the Death Penalty – Washington DC (October 1, 2026) – Following Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa P...

6/6 NACDL opposes the death penalty and is calling for it to end. In the association's own statement, Johnson said: "The state cannot make killing humane, because the killing itself is the inhumanity." Our full statement:

1/6 Christa Pike survived Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her on Sept. 30. Can the state try again? Experts tell AP it would push into uncharted legal territory. Today's wire story:

3/6 NACDL President-Elect Stephen Johnson, a Tennessee defense attorney, tells AP that whether the state can lawfully try again is "a complex question that will take significant time, attention and analysis" — and, he adds, litigation across multiple state and federal courts.

4/6 A likely first hurdle is competency. Pike regained consciousness about six days after the attempt — her team had believed she was brain dead — and awoke aware of what had happened, distressed and disoriented. Johnson expects years of litigation over whether she's even competent to be executed.

1/6 Christa Pike survived Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her on Sept. 30. Can the state try again? Experts tell AP it would push into uncharted legal territory. Today's wire story:

2/6 Pike, 50, was given two doses of pentobarbital and left with burns and blisters on her arms; her prognosis remains uncertain. Gov. Bill Lee has paused executions and ordered an outside review, and a judge ordered the state to preserve all evidence from the failed Sept. 30 attempt.

404media.coSurveillance Company Tells Cops It Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock CamerasA surveillance company wants to "close the gap" that Flock won't do, by pitching facial recognition on its cameras.

🧵A surveillance vendor is telling police it can add facial recognition to Flock camera data. Flock says it never will. Someone else is ready to jump in. New reporting from @404media.co: www.404media.co/surveillance...

This is the lesson of the ALPR debate. A vendor's promise is not a safeguard. Once a mass surveillance network exists, other companies build on top of it. Only law and judicial oversight set real limits.

nacdl.orgNACDL - Fourth Amendment CenterNACDL's Fourth Amendment Center offers direct assistance to defense lawyers handling cases involving new surveillance tools, technologies and tactics that infringe on the constitutional rights of peop...

Defenders see what a bad match can do to a person who did nothing wrong. NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center challenges dragnet surveillance in court. Learn more:

VIDIZMO advertises tools that name people on live camera feeds, match faces to watchlists, and flag "behavior." Its CEO says the Flock integration is not built yet. He also says the company "would love to do the integration."

theguardian.comGone in 90 seconds: an ‘invisibilized’ ICE is arresting more people than everAfter public backlash, the Trump administration changed its tactics from ‘siege’ to ‘soft feet’. Now, ICE is everywhere

The company also pitches searching footage by race, gender, and age. Privacy experts have long warned that these categories are unreliable. Police would be searching for people using labels a computer cannot reliably assign.

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Gillian Brockell

@gillianbrockell.com

Talking recently to family members of people snatched up and expelled to third countries by ICE, I learned: 1) All of those captured were in 287(g) jurisdictions; 2) None of the family members had known what 287(g) was and had erroneously thought people with no arrests were safe.

Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social

“The administration is able to essentially hide a multiplied ICE force not only in unmarked cars, and not only behind masks, but also within local law enforcement through the 287(g) program. I call it the invisibilizing of immigration enforcement.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

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Public Defenseless Podcast

@pdefenselesspod.bsky.social

Police got one warrant. After that, they and Google narrowed the list between themselves, no judge in the loop. Jumana Musa on the Chatrie ruling: pulling your location history is a Fourth Amendment search. Full episode: open.spotify.com/episode/3l42...

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FAMM Foundation

@famm.org

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Public Defenseless Podcast

@pdefenselesspod.bsky.social

21 Sept

Police had no suspect. So they got a warrant for every phone Google tracked inside a circle on a map. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3: that's a Fourth Amendment search. Jumana Musa (@nacdl.org) joins Hunter. Now available to Patreon subscribers: linktr.ee/pdefenseless...

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NACDL Fourth Amendment Center

@4ac.nacdl.org

19 Sept

The nationwide backlash against automatic license plate readers is “uniting Trump country and progressive strongholds alike,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Fight for the Future

@fightforthefuture.org

18 Sept

NEW THIS MORNING: our director @evangreer.bsky.social in the New York Times detailing how Flock became Public Enemy No.1 and what we can learn about how to fight back against the surveillance tech that permeates our lives through grassroots organizing. Read it @ FFTF.link/NYT

fftf.linkOpinion | How Flock Cameras Became the EnemyThe campaign against Flock shows that fighting to protect personal privacy isn’t a lost cause.

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Puff the Magic Hater

@mskellymhayes.bsky.social

18 Sept

Locking people up for using drugs will never make sense to me. The people I've known who've used drugs, in spite of the threat of severe consequences, did so bc they are not/were not okay. Locking people in dungeons traumatizes them further and makes these patterns even harder to break.

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James Alistair Henry

@jamesbluecat.bsky.social

17 Sept

Jeez, this is grim. "At a moment when legitimate news organizations are struggling to survive, it has raked in untold hundreds of millions of eyeballs... polluting the media ecosystem with noxious AI clickbait designed to do little else but trick Google’s algorithms."

Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social

NEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. For years, its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting. When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. Somehow, what came next was even worse. futurism.com/artificial-i...

futurism.comHow Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per MonthBrown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie

@audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app

17 Sept

i thought this was neat ballsandstrikes.org/ethics-accou...

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Radley Balko

@radleybalko.bsky.social

17 Sept

I wrote about the insane developments in Chris Duncan's case. He was exonerated by the LA Sup. Ct. in June. But the local DA vowed to re-try him. Yesterday, cops showed up at the home of alleged victim's mother, demanded her DNA, threatened to arrest her, and said they would exhume her daughter.

radleybalko.substack.comBreaking: DA demands DNA from Chris Duncan and Haley Oliveaux’s motherLouisiana continues to persecute a wrongly convicted man

NACDL reposted

npr.orgThe Supreme Court rejects Trump's mail voting restrictions for this year's midtermsThe Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration's request to allow mail-in voting restrictions under a U.S. Postal Service plan for the midterm general election.

🚨 The Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration's bid to impose new mail-in voting restrictions for the 2026 midterms. Ballots will keep moving through USPS as usual.🧵 NPR ↓ www.npr.org/2026/09/14/n...

That's why NACDL has launched the Criminalization of Voting Rights Rapid Response Team — to defend individuals and organizations facing criminal investigation or prosecution over voting-related actions. The Team is mobilizing now.

forms.gleNational Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Criminalization of Voting Rights Committee - Rapid Response TeamThe National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Criminalization of Voting Rights Committee is building a Rapid Response Team of volunteer attorneys to respond quickly to voting-related criminal ...

Are you a licensed attorney? Join the Rapid Response Team roster. Volunteers identify cases, conduct intakes, and relay them to @NACDL.org's Criminalization of Voting Rights Committee. Sign up 👇 forms.gle/oSA8ac4Wyj5s...

Trump has cast mail voting as a route to fraud by noncitizens — something studies and audits show is extremely rare, and for which the government gave the courts no evidence. Trump himself voted by mail in Florida this year.

Here's what we're watching at NACDL: as mail voting proceeds and November nears, we anticipate a spike in voting-related criminal investigations and prosecutions — aimed at voters and at the organizations that help them.

The Supreme Court kept in place lower-court injunctions blocking a USPS plan — spun from a Trump executive order — that would have forced states to hand over voter lists and add barcodes to ballot envelopes just to get them delivered. Order ↓ www.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

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