Fair Fight Initiative

Through litigation and community advocacy, Fair Fight Initiative exposes mistreatment in the law enforcement system and works to end mass incarceration.FFI fights on behalf of individuals and families who cannot afford effective representation. Through litigation, we accept individual cases that exemplify patterns of abusive practices. In addition, we work with families and communities most impacted by criminal justice systems in the Deep South to seek fundamental reforms that defund law enforcement and end mass incarceration. Some of our current cases include:•Class action litigation against the jail in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of the deadliest in the United States. The case seeks the immediate release of medically vulnerable detainees who face disproportionate risk if they were to contract COVID-19. The jail has a history of unsanitary conditions and providing a deadly lack of medical care, and this is the latest in a series of lawsuits we’ve filed holding the city and sheriff accountable. We are working in partnership with national public interest legal organizations and an international law firm. Although the court refused our request for immediate relief, we continue litigating in federal court and working with the community to get people released on bond and shine a spotlight on the dangerous conditions made worse by COVID-19.•Advocacy in Baton Rouge with community groups to shut the Baton Rouge jail down and reform the state's criminal justice system. In addition to legal staff in our home office in Savannah, we have two people on the ground in Baton Rouge. Linda Franks, the mother of Lamar Johnson, a young man who died as the result of violence and neglect in the jail in 2015, leads our work in Baton Rouge. After the death of her son, Linda founded a local coalition that is working to close the jail and reform the criminal justice system. Stacci Tobin, a formerly incarcerated person, works with Linda and is a member of the local coalition. •We brought a lawsuit on behalf of Oriel Selver, the victim of an attempted sexual assault by a south Georgia prosecutor in a reckless and criminal abuse of power. Oriel's case is part of our larger effort to bring accountability to prosecutors in south Georgia, the home of the same group of prosecutors who for months refused to charge the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. Lawyers for the prosecutor who attempted to sexually assault Oriel are claiming absolute immunity from the civil suit, essentially claiming he can do whatever he wants to women with no accountability.•We are litigating the criminal defense of Bobby Tyson, a young Black man charged with obstruction of justice after a minor traffic accident with undercover, plainclothes police officers with the Savannah, Georgia police department known as the Counter Narcotics Team ("CNT"). Since the arrest, Bobby has been stopped four more times by police for minor traffic infractions and searched by the same police department. There is little doubt that the first unlawful arrest putting Bobby into the system led to his being targeted by the city’s police department, which has a history of racism and mistreatment of Black men. This case will be used to shine a light on their racially unjust policing practices and seek to defund CNT.Fair Fight Initiative is a non-profit advocacy organization that is not affiliated with Fair Fight Action (the political action committee founded by Stacey Abrams).