Bio
Alexis Agathocleous (he/him) is the Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program (RJP). Prior to joining the ACLU in 2020, he worked with the Innocence Project’s Strategic Litigation Department, focusing on eyewitness identification evidence, false confessions, and racial bias in the criminal legal system. Before that, Mr. Agathocleous was Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where he also litigated federal civil rights cases involving racial and religious profiling, the rights of incarcerated people, gender and LGBTQ justice, and the criminalization of dissent. He was counsel for plaintiffs in Aref v. Holder, challenging policies and conditions at the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Communications Management Units, in Ashker v. Governor of California, a class action lawsuit challenging long-term solitary confinement at California’s Pelican Bay prison that resulted in the transfer of thousands of prisoners from SHU units across the state, and in Doe v. Jindal and Doe v. Caldwell, successful companion challenges to a Louisiana law that required individuals convicted of a “Crime Against Nature” to register as sex offenders. Previously, he was the Director of the Reinvestigation Project at the Office of the Appellate Defender (OAD) in New York City, where he also represented indigent defendants on appeal from felony convictions as a senior staff attorney. Mr. Agathocleous was a Karpatkin Fellow with RJP, and graduated from Brown University in 1997 and Yale Law School in 2003.