News & Commentary

August 16, 2010 - The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri today won a judgment in favor of Plaintiff Shirley Phelps-Roper, protecting her First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Chief United States District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan, Jr., declared Missouri’s funeral protest statute unconstitutional. The court also struck down a back-up statute intended to go in effect when the original law was found unconstitutional.

Court of Appeals Voids Termination of Immigrant’s Parental Rights

June 30, 2010– In response to civil liberties threats caused by the recent passage of Arizona’s racial profiling law, the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri issued a travel alert today informing Missouri residents of their rights when stopped by law enforcement when traveling in Arizona. The unconstitutional law, known as SB 1070, requires law enforcement agents to demand "papers" from people they stop who they suspect are not authorized to be in the U.S. If individuals are unable to prove to officers that they are permitted to be in the U.S., they may be subject to warrantless arrests without any probable cause that they have committed a crime.

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.