Litigation to watch in 2026

By Alexandria Staubach
 
The year is just two weeks old, but two cases--one with significant implications for the criminal justice system--already have notable court activity.
 
In the Wisconsin Court of Appeals District 3, a defendant in a criminal case filed his opening appellate brief seeking a declaration that a 468-day detention without appointment of counsel or a preliminary hearing violated his due process rights.
 
James Grandberry sat for 14 months without even a copy of the complaint describing the allegations against him. He filed pro se motions to dismiss along the way.
 
Grandberry’s case stems from the state’s first wiretap case aimed at disrupting the distribution of fentanyl.  The case was filed under seal.
 
Grandberry was arrested in summer 2024, but counsel was not appointed until September 2025, and his preliminary hearing was delayed until then.
 
For individuals who remain in custody, preliminary hearings are supposed to take place within 10 days. But court commissioners in Brown County found exception to the rule at least seven times over 14 months.
 
Granberry’s attorneys filed an interlocutory appeal—meaning an appeal before judgment in the trial court. The Court of Appeals, in its decision agreeing to hear the case, cited a 2022 Court of Appeals decision in State of Wisconsin v. Nhia Lee.
 
In Lee, the appeals court ruled that a 113-day delay in appointment of counsel violated Lee’s rights, leading to dismissal without prejudice. A dismissal without prejudice allowed prosecutors to refile the charges.
 
The Lee appeal was initially taken to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, but after oral arguments that court dismissed its review as “improvidently granted.”
 
Justice Rebecca Dallet in Lee noted that the court was minimizing important questions “about the efficacy of Wisconsin's process for appointing counsel for indigent defendants, which protects one of a defendant's most important constitutional rights.”
 
Grandberry’s appeal asks 1) whether “during his exceedingly long stay in jail,” the lower court appropriately considered all of the relevant factors in finding good cause to continue to extend the time to appoint counsel and hold the preliminary hearing, and 2) whether Grandberry’s due process rights were “denied by delay.”
 
In the second case, the ACLU of Wisconsin, the national ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, and the Law Forward law firm join forces seeking to intervene in litigation brought by the federal administration against the Wisconsin Elections Commission for refusing to give the U.S. Department of Justice confidential information about Wisconsin’s registered voters.
 
“It has been widely reported that the United States intends to use this data to build an unauthorized national voter database and to target voters for potential challenges and disenfranchisement, and the United States’ own representations to states tend to confirm those suspicions,” the coalition’s memorandum says.
 
A press release from the ACLU of Wisconsin says Wisconsin is among 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, that the U.S. DOJ has sued to obtain sensitive voter data.