Iretha JEAN LillY
Ms. Lilly died in the McLennan County Jail after complaining of chest pain FOR THREE HOURS, receiving three EKGs (each of which revealed she was suffering from a myocardial infarction), and requiring medical care the jail knew it could not provide. The federal district court nonetheless held no one was responsible under the United States Constitution. William unsuccessfully argued this case on appeal to the Fifth Circuit on December 3, 2019 and appealed it to the United States Supreme Court, which denied review.
BarbARA Thomas
Source: KPRC
In 2014, a Houston Police Department drug task force (the same task force responsible for the Harding Street murders) knocked down Ms. Thomas’s front door looking for a drug dealer they only knew as “Little Black”. They held Ms. Thomas and her adult autistic son at gunpoint while they searched her home. William sued for violations of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, but the courts held the officers’ reliance on an unidentified confidential informant, lie to a judge, and refusal to corroborate the informant’s information based on the racial composition of the Thomas’s neighborhood were all reasonable under the circumstances. William appealed this case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which denied review.
Stephanie Jones
Ms. Jones (yet another Black woman) was arrested in her own home for felony possession of a controlled substance in a school zone after officers found two pills in her bedroom; she and her father (who lived there at the time) had valid prescriptions for the medications. She was prosecuted for 11 months and lost her job. The federal court held the arrests were legal based on Threlkeld v. State, 558 S.W.2d 472 (Tex. Crim. App. 1977); essentially, Texas law somehow states that prescriptions are affirmative defenses which can be ignored by arresting officers. William disagrees on numerous grounds (including the Interstate Commerce Clause), but the United States Supreme Court again denied review.