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ACLU-NJ Bestows Highest Civil Liberties Honor

For Immediate Release
November 20, 2006

NEWARK, N.J. -- The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has awarded its highest honor to Steve Latimer, a partner in the firm of Loughlin & Latimer in Hackensack. The award was announced on November 16 during the ACLU-NJ's annual U.S. Supreme Court briefing.

"As recipient of our 2006 Roger N. Baldwin Award, Steve Latimer exemplifies the kind of commitment to social justice and has the legal acumen that we need now more than ever to confront government abuses of power," said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Deborah Jacobs. "Steve has worked selflessly for decades to help everyday people whose fundamental American rights were violated." Named after the founder of the ACLU, the Roger N. Baldwin award recognizes outstanding contributions to the preservation and promotion of civil liberties.

Latimer specializes in police misconduct, employment discrimination and First Amendment cases. His work in the First Amendment area includes a successful defense of the Indian community in Edison, where the town tried to prevent the community from holding its annual Navratri religious and cultural festival. He also has won the right of a community group in Monmouth County to leaflet in the county welfare center. He successfully defended a student when the student was prosecuted for terroristic threats for putting "this school sucks" on his Web site. Currently, he represents a person who believes that she and her family are on the government's "no-fly" list. As an ACLU cooperating attorney, he recently represented a prisoner in New Jersey who was barred from practicing his religion.

A graduate of Tufts University and New York University School of Law, Latimer was admitted to practice in New York in 1968 and New Jersey in 1979 and also is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court and several federal courts of appeals and district courts. As an experienced federal trial and appellate litigator, he has spent his career in the defense of constitutional rights and civil liberties.

Latimer has specialized in representation of people in federal civil rights actions, employment discrimination and school discipline cases, as well as condemned persons in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Because of his defense of condemned persons, in 1998, he was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. He has been active in the efforts of the American Bar Association to achieve a nationwide moratorium on executions and also has worked toward that end with the New Jerseyans for a Death Penalty Moratorium and the New Jersey State Bar Association. "I took an oath when I was in the Navy to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic," Latimer said. "Sadly, some of the greatest threats to the Constitution are coming from our own leaders. It's up to us to remind them of what this country stands for -- that no one is above the law, that we are made stronger, not weaker, when we uphold our rights."