A civil rights lawsuit asserting both state and federal civil rights violations against the West Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office of West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. This case seeks justice in the face of racially-charged, aggressive and unconstitutional law enforcement searches motivated by Louisiana’s asset forfeiture regime.
On March 26, 2021, what should have been a routine traffic stop for Nia Mills became a harrowing ordeal that left her—a Black woman, a mother, and the daughter of a U.S. military veteran—stranded outside a sheriff’s office in a foreign state at night. After being spit at, threatened with deportation, and told her partner had been shot and maimed by a sheriff’s deputy, Ms. Mills was left with no cash and no car to travel the nearly two hundred miles back to her home state.
One year later, the Trial Impact Project, along with the ACLU of Louisiana, sued the sheriff of West Baton Rouge Parish on behalf of Ms. Mills. In November 2023, SJLF, ACLU of Louisiana, and the Southern Poverty Law Center together filed a First Amended Complaint asserting that the officers also violated state law by intentionally subjecting her to emotional distress, invading her privacy, and impounding her car.
On November 21, 2024, a United States District Judge held in two orders that the West Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office and its officers are not entitled to qualified immunity, and that a jury should decide if Defendants unreasonably searched Ms. Mills’s phone, car, purse, and laptop; invaded her privacy; and seized her car and money.
In its order, the Court held that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity on any claims because a reasonable jury could agree with Ms. Mills that she was subjected to “an extended illegal detention”—and if so, the detention and all that came after it were “unconstitutional under clearly defined law.” (ECF 195 at pp. 22, 29.) That included trying to obtain Ms. Mills’s consent to the searches through “quintessential coercion” (id. at p. 22), holding her at the station for nearly six hours while the officers rifled through her belongings and swiped her bank cards, and impounding her car with “absolutely no justification” (id. at p. 26). The Trial Impact Project settled the case favorably for Ms. Mills in February 2026, after securing victories on several motions and developing additional evidence related to racial trauma and policing.
This case, along with Clark v. Hotard, et al, is part of a larger effort throughout Louisiana to shine light on rampant police misconduct disproportionately targeting Black drivers throughout the state. Ms. Mills’s story is not unique: every day Black drivers have their lives upended and their livelihoods stolen as a result of racist policing in Louisiana. This case and others like it hold law enforcement accountable and, in the aggregate, seek to change police conduct and policy.
In a win for civil rights in the South, a Louisiana federal judge held that Social Justice Legal Foundation client Nia Mills could proceed to trial in her case against a Louisiana sheriff and his deputies for violating her Fourth Amendment rights.
NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge held yesterday that Justice Lab client Nia Mills could proceed to trial in her case against West Baton Rouge Sheriff Officers Allen Connelly, John Gaudet and other deputies for violating her Fourth Amendment rights.
Trial Impact Project crafted novel claims that will help civil rights plaintiffs in future cases. Together with Ms. Mills, our team dug into deputies’ reckless use of Louisiana’s civil asset forfeiture system to seize working people’s earnings on baseless (and never prosecuted) accusations of misdemeanor drug violations. With significant financial incentives at play, deputies prey on drivers of color and use tools such as ERAD, a financial instrument scanning device that allows officers to check balances, freeze assets and seize them without so much as a warrant even proper training on the system.
Our trial team fought to (and did) get critical discovery from the West Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office as well as The ERAD Group, based in Florida. We took nearly a dozen depositions and developed expert evidence on the long-term trauma effects of racist policing—a first in the Fifth Circuit. And we developed startling evidence about the lack of controls in place at the West Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office that allowed for, if not encouraged, the civil rights violations against Ms. Mills.
