News & Commentary

Contact: Debbie Read

ST. LOUIS, April 15, 2010 The United States District Court, Eastern Missouri, has ruled in favor of plaintiff Frank Ancona, Imperial Wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who was seeking a temporary restraining order against the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Ancona was represented by the ACLU of Eastern Missouri.

JEFFERSON CITY, MO – Faced with an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, a political operative who has failed twice before to place an anti-affirmative action initiative on the Missouri ballot has abandoned his latest attempt to rewrite the state constitution to ban equal opportunity programs.

ST. LOUIS, February 4, 2010 -- In a consent judgment entered today by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, the City of St. Louis and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department are ordered to stop enforcing a St. Louis City ordinance that criminalized the placement of political leaflets on vehicles parked on public streets.

ST. LOUIS, December 28, 2009 - The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri today filed suit on behalf of Michael Bauer, alleging Bauer was held in the Jefferson County and Madison County jails for more than a month earlier this year on a body attachment that had been withdrawn in 2007. A body attachment is similar to a warrant but issued in a civil proceeding rather than a criminal proceeding. The suit alleges that unlike persons picked up on a misdemeanor or felony warrant, Bauer was never given an opportunity to appear before a judge to say that he was being held mistakenly.

On December 24, 2009, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri and the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri filed a friend of the court (amicus curiae) brief with the Missouri Supreme Court in support of lawyer Carl Smith’s Petition challenging his conviction, on August 5, 2009, of and his sentence to 120 days in jail for criminal contempt based on his appellate advocacy on behalf of clients in a grand jury matter.

ST. LOUIS, December 17, 2009 - The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri (ACLU-EM) has filed a lawsuit in federal District Court asserting the right to place political leaflets on vehicles parked on public streets. The lawsuit, filed against the City of St. Louis and the St. Louis Police Department, alleges that a city ordinance prohibiting such behavior is a violation of free speech.

ST. LOUIS, December 14, 2009 -- The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri applauded a long-anticipated ruling issued December 11 by Judge Philip Heagney. The decision came in a case filed in 2007 by the ACLU of Eastern Missouri on behalf of John Chasnoff.

JEFFERSON CITY – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Eastern Missouri will be in court Wednesday, November 30 to argue on behalf of Kelly Glossip, whose partner, Dennis Engelhard, was a state trooper killed in the line of duty while responding to an accident on Christmas Day, 2009. Missouri offers survivor benefits to spouses of state troopers who are killed in the line of duty, but excludes committed same-sex partners from receiving those benefits. Glossip is seeking the same survivor benefits provided to different-sex partners.