A couple of major pro bono wins top this week's Litigator of the Week runners-up.

First up is a team effort that freed Curtis Flowers after more than two decades in jail. After six trials and a reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Mississippi Attorney General's office announced on Sept. 4 that it will not prosecute Flowers a seventh time for the 1996 murders of four people at a furniture store. With witnesses recanting since the last trial, prosecutors said no one remains to incriminate Flowers, and that there are other potential suspects. Flowers' defense team included Jonathan Abram, Kathryn Ali, David Maxwell, and paralegal Ashley Johnson of Hogan Lovells; Rob McDuff of the Mississippi Center for Justice; Henderson Hill of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project; Sheri Johnson and Keir Weyble of Cornell Law School; Tucker Carrington of the George C. Cochran Mississippi Innocence Project; and attorney Ben Lewis.

Also on the pro bono front, a group of civil rights organizations, local governments, and individuals persuaded U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California on September 5 to grant a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from shutting down its census operations until a September 17 hearing where the judge will consider the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction. Plaintiffs are represented by lawyers at the Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Latham & Watkins, Public Counsel, the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, the Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney, the Office of the Salinas City Attorney, Edelson P.C., the Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and Holland & Knight.