Biography
Matthew Segal is a civil rights lawyer whose cases have overturned tens of thousands of criminal dispositions. He is a Senior Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, where he co-launched its State Supreme Court Initiative, which seeks to expand civil rights and civil liberties through state court litigation.
Before joining the national ACLU, Segal served for 11 years as Legal Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts and for four years as an Assistant Federal Defender in North Carolina. He clerked for Hon. Raymond C. Fisher at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Segal has argued cases that secured the release of more than 5,000 people from state prisons and jails during the COVID pandemic; temporarily halted President Trump's first travel ban; recognized state constitutional protection for cell phone location data; and dismissed more than 61,000 wrongful drug charges in the Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan lab scandals, which included the single largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
Before joining the national ACLU, Segal served for 11 years as Legal Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts and for four years as an Assistant Federal Defender in North Carolina. He clerked for Hon. Raymond C. Fisher at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Segal has argued cases that secured the release of more than 5,000 people from state prisons and jails during the COVID pandemic; temporarily halted President Trump's first travel ban; recognized state constitutional protection for cell phone location data; and dismissed more than 61,000 wrongful drug charges in the Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan lab scandals, which included the single largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in U.S. history.