Recent detainees at Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail tell horror stories.

A real estate broker from Maryland says he watched helplessly while gang members beat a senior citizen. An Orange County college professor says he was denied diabetes medication and forced to stand in a room where rotting trash lay four inches thick on the floor.

These and many other reports are the basis for a lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California that asks a federal judge to find the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in contempt for failing to improve overcrowded conditions at the Men's Central Jail.

In a 10-page ruling issued in Oct. 2006, U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the county from holding more that 20 inmates for more than 24 hours in small holding cells in it's inmate reception center, located at the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

But as testimonials gathered by the ACLU/SC have revealed, brutality and inhumane living conditions remain the norm and may have even gotten worse.

"Men's Central Jail has become Los Angeles County's version of Devil's Island, a hellhole where detainees convicted of no criminal offenses and frequently charged with non-violent offenses such as traffic violations are subjected to sleep deprivation for want of beds, insufficient feedings and wholesale lack of appropriate physical and mental health care," said Mark Rosenbaum, ACLU/SC legal director. "In some cases, detainees have been hooded and chained to benches. These practices fail minimal standards of human decency."

The Supreme Court's fractured 5-4 decision to ban an abortion procedure with no exception for a mother's health is "frightening," said ACLU/SC Executive Director Ramona Ripston. "The high court has made a ruling severely limiting a woman's right to choose and this is the most damaging attack on this fundamental right in 30 years," she stated.

The ACLU had filed an amicus brief on behalf of the National Abortion Federation and medical doctors who opposed the 2003 federal ban.

This was the first abortion decision since the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, which left only one woman on the Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision an "alarming" departure from the precedent set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

"For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health," she wrote in a sharp dissent.

Statement of Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California:

This morning the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2003. In its first abortion decision since the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court ruled 5-4 that the law does not violate the Constitution by imposing an undue burden on a woman's right to end a pregnancy. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief on behalf of the National Abortion Federation, sharply criticized this decision by the court.

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, said, "This is a frightening decision. The high court has made a ruling severely limiting a woman's right to choose and this is the most damaging attack on this fundamental right in 30 years."