Alphonse A. Gerhardstein (born 1951) is a civil rights attorney in Ohio who has been litigating since 1976. While he is best known nationally as lead counsel for James Obergefell in the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision Obergefell v. Hodges, he has been an advocate on behalf of prisoners, victims of police misconduct and women seeking reproductive freedom throughout his career, in addition to LGBTQ causes like same-sex marriage. He has recovered millions of dollars and secured substantial reforms for victims of official misconduct. He is also the founder of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a nonprofit agency that advocates and litigates for criminal justice reform.
Early life
Gerhardstein was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Carolyn and Richard Gerhardstein. His father was the manager of a commercial chicken farm for over ten years, then lost both his job and the pension he had been promised. In an interview on WCET, the local Cincinnati PBS affiliate, Gerhardstein described how this experience and its effect on his family deeply impressed upon him the plight of powerless individuals in the face of powerful corporations. He attended Beloit College, class of '73, where he met and married Mimi Gingold, the daughter of juvenile court judge Archie Gingold of St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended New York University School of Law on a Root-Tilden public interest scholarship and earned his Juris Doctor in 1976.
Legal career
Gerhardstein began his legal career as a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of Cincinnati, Ohio. After two years, he joined Robert Laufman, a leading civil rights attorney, practicing primarily in the areas of employment discrimination, police misconduct and prisoner rights. After Laufman's retirement in 2004, Jennifer Branch joined him as a partner and the firm became Gerhardstein and Branch, LPA. The firm described its mission as litigating "causes, not cases." Jennifer Branch was elected as a common pleas judge in Hamilton County Ohio in 2020 and Gerhardstein then merged his firm with another to create Friedman, Gilbert and Gerhardstein.
Civil rights practice
Prisoner rights
Gerhardstein commented in a Frontline interview that prisoners have no political base, only the power of the courts to redress grievances. He has sought to redress those grievances through litigation.
In 1994, Gerhardstein was named lead counsel in a class action against the state officers, administrators and staff of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, on behalf of inmate victims of the riot that occurred there in 1993. The plaintiffs were awarded a record $4.1 million as part of a class action settlement that included sweeping reforms of the practices and procedures at that maximum security prison.
Gerhardstein and fellow attorney Robert Newman had previously sued the state of Ohio for cruel and unusual punishment on behalf of a class of mentally ill prisoners. After filing the legal action, they worked with the defendant Director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections to address the underlying problems. That collaboration resulted in a court enforced consent decree providing for reforms based on a treatment-oriented approach to mentally ill inmates in all Ohio state prisons.
He also filed a class action challenging the level of medical and dental services provided for inmates by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction in 2003. That challenge resulted in a settlement agreement including a five-year supervised plan to substantially improve those services.
From 2008–2015, Gerhardstein worked with the Children's Law Center of Covington, Kentucky and achieved significant reforms in the Ohio juvenile justice system by entering into an agreed order in cooperation with the defendant administrators of the Ohio Department of Youth Services on behalf of incarcerated juveniles. That agreement eventually resulted in a dramatic reduction of the inmate population, closure of several juvenile prisons, elimination of solitary confinement and improved mental health, educational and recreational services for the children in the juvenile detention facilities throughout the state. In 1997 he founded the Ohio Justice and Policy Center which continues to pursue reforms for incarcerated people in Ohio.
Police misconduct
"There are lots of different strategies that don't rely on arresting black people and feeding more mass incarceration, and that's what we've worked so hard on." Gerhardstein is quoted as saying in an article published in The Atlantic.