Our success is driven by our clients’ courage and their personal commitment to equal justice for all.
Client Testimonials
One month before the January 6 insurrection, white supremacist members of the Proud Boys vandalized the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington, DC. The Washington Lawyers’ Committee helped the church secure over a one million dollar judgment against the Proud Boys for their racially motivated violence.
Workers’ Rights Clinic volunteers Stanley Zirkin and Angela Sanyal share what participating in the Clinic means to them. The hours they spend volunteering are crucial to protecting the rights of workers in DC, MD, and VA.
Kahssay Ghebrebrhan shares how the District of Columbia’s Clean Hands Law barred him from continuing his street vending business. WLC filed a constitutional challenge to this law on behalf of workers disqualified from obtaining occupational licenses due to debt.
Prior to WLC’s involvement, DC Health’s at-home COVID tests were inaccessible to blind and low-vision residents. Rev. Raymond Raysor shares his experience of isolation during the pandemic and the importance of making COVID-19 tests accessible to those in the disability community.
Maurie Barboza, the nephew of Lena Santos Ferguson, talks about his aunt’s denial of membership into the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her race. WLC participated in efforts across 40 years to ensure Lena received the recognition she deserved.
In January 2022, on Governor Youngkin’s first day in office in Virginia, he issued an executive order that eviscerated public schools’ authority to impose masking where needed. 12 students with disabilities and their families, including parent Tasha Nelson, challenged the executive order to ensure kids with disabilities could safely attend school
Sonya Zollicoffer shares her experience working for the Prince George’s County Police Department (PGPD). Sonya was one of 10 officers of color that sued the Department after enduring a work environment rife with race discrimination and retaliation.
Paul Mack shares his experience working for the Prince George’s County Police Department (PGPD). Paul was one of 10 officers of color that sued the Department after enduring a work environment rife with race discrimination and retaliation.
Jackie Cote shares her story of fighting for health insurance for her wife, Dee, and the rights of LGBTQ workers. Her class action lawsuit charged Walmart with discriminating against employees who were married to same-sex spouses by denying their spouses health insurance benefits. In May 2017, a federal judge approved a $7.5 million class settlement.
Our client Louis Sawyer recently talked about the parole process and returning citizens. The Committee’s DC Prisoners’ Project trains pro bono representatives to assist prisoners with their parole grant hearings, and advocates for the rights of returning citizens.
Maurice Alexander’s housing application was wrongly rejected due to a 7-year-old, non-violent, non-drug related misdemeanor. He shares his story about why he wants to make sure others will not suffer the same injustice.
For years, Domingo Zamora and his fellow workers were underpaid for long, hard hours of work. He shared the devastating impact of wage theft on himself and his family. In the end, his courage helped secure over $645,000 for 25 plaintiffs.
WLC helped L.J., an individual from DC who was incarcerated in the BOP for 23 years, find representation and secure release at his fourth parole hearing.
In April 2023, WLC and our partners filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated residents with serious medical needs at the DC Department of Corrections, challenging DOC’s dysfunctional and unconstitutional healthcare system.
In 2022 and 2023, WLC and its partners conducted an 18-month investigation into the Special Management Unit (SMU) at USP Thomson and detailed more than 120 accounts of “extreme physical and psychological abuse” endured by residents. The BOP closed the SMU at Thomson on February 14, 2023.
The Washington Lawyers’ Committee, on behalf of three patients, successfully sought emergency relief to ensure that the District conformed its practices to best available guidance, significantly improving patient care and lowering infection and death rates dramatically.
In 2020, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee filed suit on behalf of a coalition of disability organizations and individual voters against the Commonwealth of Virginia for excluding Virginians with disabilities from absentee voting.
For decades, students in Hanover County, VA were forced to attend middle and high schools that glorified the names and values of the Confederacy. Black students in particular endured a hostile school environment that derived directly from the naming of the schools after Confederate generals and their defense of slavery. The Washington Lawyers’ Committee represented the Hanover County NAACP in litigation to change the school names…
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, D.C. Public Schools stopped providing education to students at the DC Jail, and instead students received inaccessible, inadequate, and inconsistently delivered work packets that they had to complete without instruction or assistance.
The largest bar exam preparation company in the nation, BarBri, Inc., failed to provide equal access to key parts of its bar preparation courses to blind students.
Columbia Heights is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the District. It is also one of the most rapidly changing. An African American neighborhood for most of the last half of the last century that welcomed Latinx immigrants escaping the Wars in Central American in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has rapidly gentrified.
In a recent landmark decision, the Fourth Circuit held that the failure to provide a videophone to a prisoner who is deaf so that he can communicate with people outside of prison may violate his First Amendment rights.
In the early 1990s, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee exposed rampant discrimination against African American patrons at Denny’s restaurants. Black patrons were denied seating, required to pay first, or made to sit in the back of the restaurant.
The Administrative Maximum (ADX) Facility in Florence, Colorado is the highest security prison in the federal prison system. This supermax prison engages in extreme forms of isolation.
With the help of Washington Lawyers’ Committee, a group of African American applicants and employees received a groundbreaking $6.5 million settlement from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) — and a chance to work.
Domingo Zamora and his fellow construction workers were working shifts as long as 48 hours straight, moving from one project to another — and never receiving overtime. We sued and secured substantial back pay.
In 2021, Park 7 Tenant Union sued their property management company for obstructing the tenants’ efforts to organize and protest the deteriorating housing conditions in their apartment building. With representation from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee and Cohen Millstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, the tenant union won.
The DC Department of Human Services (DHS) repeatedly failed to provide language access services to DC residents, violating the civil rights of individual residents and harming the overall health of the community.