Race, Disability, and Police Misconduct: A Discrit Approach to Privacy Law and the Killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey

In March 2024, police killed Ryan Gainer, a Black teenager with autism, in his California home after his family sought help during a behavioral crisis. Several months later, police killed Sonya Massey, a Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis, in her Illinois home. This Comment examines the failure of U.S. privacy law to protect disabled people of color in their homes, using the deaths of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey as case studies. Through the lens of Critical Disability Studies (DisCrit), it exposes the systemic violations of both physical and decisional privacy that disproportionately impact affect disabled individuals of color. This Comment ultimately advocates for an abolitionist approach to privacy law reform, proposing a framework that explicitly addresses the intersections of race and disability to provide meaningful privacy protections for marginalized communities.