RBGG stands with people across the United States and the world to condemn the racist murder of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  We support protesters and all who are speaking out against this injustice and our country’s ingrained, systemic and de jure history of slavery, racism, segregation, and lynchings. That history includes mass incarceration and the new Jim Crow, which we fight against daily through our prison and jail cases.  

As a civil rights law firm, one of our goals is ending police brutality, as evidenced in the motion we filed on June 3 in the Armstrong class action that asks a federal court to order the State of California to stop the widespread abuse and torture of prisoners with disabilities by correctional officers. We are proud of this work and other motions, petitions, and appeals we have pursued over the past 45 years in pursuit of racial justice and reform of the criminal justice system.

In addition to our ongoing civil rights legal work, we are exploring ways in which to expand our community involvement, pro bono work, and charitable giving to better address this crisis.  We encourage all our friends and colleagues to do the same and welcome suggestions for meaningful action.    

The murders of George Floyd,  Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, the federal government’s inadequate response, and the constant repetition of these outrages, hurt all of us in different degrees and different ways.  As our colleague the late Jane Kahn taught us, we must take time to process the secondary trauma of these events and take care of ourselves and each other so that we can continue our important work.  In the midst of a pandemic and unprecedented political unrest, we will continue to act in solidarity and hope that we can as a society seize this moment to root out institutional racism, advance social and economic justice, and bring about profound and lasting change.