Peter Eliasberg, photographed on the Los Angeles Instances in El Segundo on Oct. 25.
Should you Google Peter Eliasberg, the outcomes are deceptive: You’ll see him at movie awards. Galas. Film premieres. Lanky, with perpetually tousled salt-and-pepper hair, he appears to be like a bit of misplaced on the crimson carpet alongside the blond girl within the images — his spouse, Catherine Dent. She’s the actor of the pair.
What you gained’t discover, as a result of images are banned within the federal courtrooms in downtown L.A., are photographs of Eliasberg in his admittedly much less glamorous ingredient doing what he does greatest: arguing in entrance of a decide and placing concern into the guts of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Division.
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At the moment, three main lawsuits are difficult notoriously dangerous circumstances and abuse inside L.A. County’s sprawling community of county jails, that are run by the Sheriff’s Division. As chief counsel on the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Eliasberg is representing hundreds of inmates in two of them. In 2022, Eliasberg and colleagues reignited one of many circumstances, which dates again to the Seventies, with the bombshell discovery that jail employees had been chaining mentally sick folks to benches for days at a time. The revelation practically led to a contempt listening to towards the county the next 12 months — one thing officers solely narrowly prevented by acquiescing to the ACLU’s calls for and making main modifications on the Inmate Reception Heart downtown.
The opposite case, which Eliasberg spearheaded 12 years in the past, is centered on the beatings and diverse violence meted out by deputies. Although change has been halting, during the last decade jailers have no less than stopped beating inmates with flashlights and now punch them within the face far much less usually than they used to. That may appear to be a low bar for progress, but it surely’s not the sort of tradition shift that sheriff’s departments are likely to make on their very own.
Neither of those huge items of litigation is a one-man present: In court docket, Eliasberg is at all times flanked by a dogged staff of ACLU legal professionals. However at 63, he’s been on the case longer than anybody else aside from the decide.
