LOS ANGELES - U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson ruled Monday that the Los Angeles Police Department has been engaging in unconstitutional searches of the homeless on Skid Row.

As part of it's effort to stop the criminalization of homelessness in the city of Los Angeles, the ACLU of Southern California, civil rights attorney Carol Sobel, and the law firm Hadsell & Stormer petitioned a court last December to extend a 2003 injunction that prohibits LAPD officers from indiscriminately stopping and searching the homeless without adequate justification.

The lawsuit claimed that LAPD officers were stopping residents of Skid Row, asking if they were on parole or probation, then even when they said they were not, searching them and their belongings.

Residents also alleged that officers sometimes initiated searches before asking their probation or parole status. All of these acts were in violation of a 2003 injunction that prohibited these types of searches. The injunction was set to expire last December.

In his ruling, Judge Pregerson granted a four-month extension of the injunction finding that the LAPD, by its own testimony, 'admitted to an unconstitutional policy' that violated the rights of Skid Row residents.

The ruling limits the LAPD from using tickets for minor infractions like sleeping on the sidewalk or jaywalking as pretexts for searches; it requires that officers either believe that the person has further evidence of a crime in order to conduct a search, or actually make an arrest for the minor offense so that the search is required as a safety precaution in transporting the person to jail.

'This is a big victory for the residents of Skid Row,' said ACLU staff attorney Peter Bibring. 'Arbitrary, unjustified searches where Skid Row residents were stopped, publicly handcuffed, and detained for about 20 minutes are oppressive to individuals and to the entire community.'

The court extended the injunction for four months saying the extension should give the LAPD ample time to review its policies and practices to ensure that they comply with current Fourth Amendment law. The court also allowed for a further extension if LAPD does not comply by August 23, 2007.

Recent detainees at Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail tell horror stories.

A real estate broker from Maryland says he watched helplessly while gang members beat a senior citizen. An Orange County college professor says he was denied diabetes medication and forced to stand in a room where rotting trash lay four inches thick on the floor.

These and many other reports are the basis for a lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California that asks a federal judge to find the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in contempt for failing to improve overcrowded conditions at the Men's Central Jail.

In a 10-page ruling issued in Oct. 2006, U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the county from holding more that 20 inmates for more than 24 hours in small holding cells in it's inmate reception center, located at the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

But as testimonials gathered by the ACLU/SC have revealed, brutality and inhumane living conditions remain the norm and may have even gotten worse.

"Men's Central Jail has become Los Angeles County's version of Devil's Island, a hellhole where detainees convicted of no criminal offenses and frequently charged with non-violent offenses such as traffic violations are subjected to sleep deprivation for want of beds, insufficient feedings and wholesale lack of appropriate physical and mental health care," said Mark Rosenbaum, ACLU/SC legal director. "In some cases, detainees have been hooded and chained to benches. These practices fail minimal standards of human decency."

The Supreme Court's fractured 5-4 decision to ban an abortion procedure with no exception for a mother's health is "frightening," said ACLU/SC Executive Director Ramona Ripston. "The high court has made a ruling severely limiting a woman's right to choose and this is the most damaging attack on this fundamental right in 30 years," she stated.

The ACLU had filed an amicus brief on behalf of the National Abortion Federation and medical doctors who opposed the 2003 federal ban.

This was the first abortion decision since the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, which left only one woman on the Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision an "alarming" departure from the precedent set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

"For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health," she wrote in a sharp dissent.