Tuesday, May 13, 2008
In 1977, I was one of about seven people meeting in a mostly abandoned building in San Francisco. We were planning to start a new political club, a political club that would have something no SF club had ever had before: the word “gay” in its name.
Part way through the meeting, somebody asked why there was no law in San Francisco making it illegal to discriminate against gay people. I was the closest thing we had to a lawyer—I was a third year law student—so I got the job of figuring out if we could pass one.
I wrote to every city in the country that had a law (not such a big postage bill). I read them all and started writing up our own. When we had a draft, I took it to the office where I worked part-time to make it look professional by using an electric typewriter. Later, a bunch of us took the typed-up draft to another office to use the thermofax machine to make copies (Kinko's hadn’t been invented yet). Then we sent copies to every person who was running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, asking if they’d support it. And we were off on a wild ride.
Nobody had told us that you couldn’t pass a civil rights law in a major city without an organization with mailing lists, paid staff, direct mail, professional lobbyists and political consultants. And since nobody told us we couldn’t do it, we did it. The law was signed in March 1978, just about a year after we started.
You might think, well, that was the olden days. Once upon a time, maybe, you could do things like that. But times have changed. Today you need professionals.
You might think that, but you’d be wrong. Last year, four people sitting around on New Year’s day decided that since their little town was a big “wedding destination,” gay folks ought to be able to get hitched there too. They had a little—but just a little—help from the ACLU. And today, the South has its first domestic partnership registry in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
We’ve distilled the help we gave the folks in Eureka Springs—and a few other things—into a complete online guide, called Get Busy, Get Equal. You should take a look at it.
Passing local domestic partnership and non-discrimination laws, or getting your employer to adopt LGBT-friendly policies, is important for two reasons. First, we’ll get state and federal laws passed a lot sooner if we pass local laws and business policies. Local laws tell politicians that the public is ready—and that they won’t lose their jobs if they support us.
Second, proposals for local laws get people talking, and when people talk to LGBT people about our lives, they start to change the way they think. No matter how many great court decisions we have, no matter how many great laws we get passed, to bring an end to discrimination, we need to get people to accept our right to live our lives as equal citizens.
I don’t care where you live or who you work for; you have some connection to a place or a company which could use a nondiscrimination policy or domestic partnership system. And if you live in America, you are definitely connected to a place where we need to have more conversation about fairness and equality for LGBT people.
So if you really care about making LGBT equality real as soon as we can, you need to get to work. Get busy. Get equal.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Just when you think there couldn't be anything worse—or more ridiculous—than an unnecessary voter ID requirement to stave off the nonexistent problem of in-person voter fraud at polling places, the Missouri House of Representatives is trying to do the Supreme Court and the state of Indiana one better: they're trying to pass an amendment to the state's constitution that would require proof of citizenship to vote. That's right, not just a state ID: an original birth certificate, naturalization papers, or passport will be required for anyone who registers to vote. If this measure passes the state senate this week, Missourians will vote on the amendment in the primary for the governor's race in August, and if it passes, the requirement will take effect before this year's presidential election.
Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan opposes the amendment, citing that it could prevent approximately 240,000 eligible Missourians from casting a vote because they can't get prove their citizenship. She adds that there have been no cases of voter impersonation fraud in the state.
Arizona passed a similar measure back in 2004; it's been tied up in the courts since it passed, and has never taken effect. The case, Intertribal Council of Ariz. Inc. v. Brewer, is awaiting trial in district court; the ACLU's Voting Rights Project and the ACLU of Arizona are part of the coalition that's suing the state.
Last week during its Democratic primary, Indiana had the dubious distinction of refusing the vote to a group of nuns in their 80s and 90s because they didn't have government-issued IDs. The nuns have said they will try to get the proper IDs before the November election, but unfortunately, none of them drive, so that's going to be a challenge in itself.
Cognizant of this event, the Joplin Globe reports: …Diana Oleskevich, justice coordinator for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, nonetheless expressed concerns. She said a “significant number of bright, intelligent women” in that St. Louis-based religious community “long ago gave up driving.
“They’re in their 80s and 90s now and are hard pressed to get the documents they need to vote,” she said. Suppressing the nun vote: Just icing on the cake of unconstitutional voting rights restriction.
Last week saw the release of a pair of reports elucidating anew the racial bias that underlies America’s response to illegal drug use. While rates of drug use are virtually identical across racial lines, African-Americans are arrested and incarcerated at a rate far outpacing the rest of the population. As detailed in the reports from the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, in 2006 two-thirds of those arrested for a drug violation were white and a third African-American, despite African-Americans comprising only 12.8 percent of the population and a comparable percentage of drug users.
Drug war apologists seek to explain away this gross racial injustice by claiming that police are merely focusing resources where violent crime and community complaints are most prevalent – namely, in inner-city African-American communities. If, the argument goes, a few extra African-American drug users wind up incarcerated due to this wholly sensible allocation of police resources, so be it. But this tired excuse no longer holds water, if it ever did, when police make more arrests for non-violent drug possession than any other crime.
In recently released figures you likely won’t see law enforcement trumpeting on your local news, we’ve learned that our scarce public safety resources most often go toward ferreting out low-level drug offenders rather than murderers, rapists and other violent criminals. There were more arrests for drug abuse violations in 2006 ( an estimated 1.9 million arrests, or 13.1 percent of the total number of arrests) than for any other offense. Furthermore, 82.5 percent of these arrests were for simple possession, and nearly half of these for marijuana.
When these numbers are taken into account along with drug use rates, the contention that the racial disparity in drug arrests is merely a byproduct of law enforcement’s focus on violent crime or a reflection of African-Americans’ greater appetite for drugs can be clearly seen for what it is: absurd.
When drug arrests, most for possession, have become law enforcement’s most frequent function, and when these arrests are marked by patent racial disparity, they cannot be written-off as side effects of legitimate enforcement patterns.
The bottom line is that prohibition of consensual activity, such as drug use, will always open the door to selective enforcement. These crimes, almost by definition, lack a complaining witness or victim, meaning that law enforcement must be granted significant discretion in selecting where and whom to investigate for such crimes. Unfortunately, in the case of drug law enforcement, selective targeting of the African-American community has been effectively institutionalized, as further evidenced by last week’s reports.
Ozomatli, the multiethnic, L.A.-based band known for its diverse sound as well as its outspoken political convictions will be performing at the ACLU 2008 Membership Conference, in Washington, D.C. on June 9.
The Grammy-award-winning group blends a variety of musical sounds including Latin, hip-hop, salsa, jazz, funk, rock and reggaeton, to deliver their intensely personal (and intensely political) message to audiences around the world.
Their latest album, Don’t Mess with the Dragon, highlights the band’s passion, and occasionally anger, over some of the current administrations’ most egregious missteps. The track “Temperatura” was inspired by the 2006 pro-immigration marches (“We wanted people to take it to the streets and turn up the heat,” says band member Wil-Dog) and “Magnolia Soul” chastises the Bush administration for their failures around Katrina.
Ozomatli will be performing, along with fellow Grammy winner Marc Cohn, Monday night of the conference during the ACLU’s gala event, “Celebrating Liberty: A Tribute to Champions of Freedom.” Ozomatli’s enthusiasm for social justice coupled with their upbeat, international sound is guaranteed to have conference goers out of their seats and rocking to the beats.
To register for the conference and to learn more about the conference agenda, confirmed speakers, plenaries and workshops visit: www.aclu.org/conference.
Friday, May 9, 2008
ACLU Staff attorney Amrit Singh filed another dispatch from Guantánamo for DailyKos, this time about the ongoing pretrial hearings of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr.  As we mentioned yesterday, Judge Sam Brownback pointed out that the prosecution's refusal to turn over to the defense team the treatment logs detailing Khadr's detention at Gitmo is preventing the case from going to trial. Col. Brownback is giving the government until May 22 to turn over these logs. Amrit describes the pretrial proceedings: In a signed, nine-page affidavit filed in March, [Khadr] describes charges of abuse at the hands of U.S. interrogators, saying that he was repeatedly interrogated while he was in excruciating pain, hooded and menaced by barking dogs, and threatened with rape. The U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division's (CID) documents corroborate these claims of abuse. But even more revealing is Amrit’s account of a cover-up that was revealed at yesterday's hearing: Lt. Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, stated in court that a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) report into Khadr’s abuse at Bagram includes a statement by “Sergeant P.” corroborating Khadr’s claim that he was left standing in Bagram for hours on end with his hands extended above his head and chained to the ceiling. …. The CID investigation was however abruptly discontinued when it ran across “Sergeant C” and found that he was the subject of a court martial investigation. According to Kuebler, “Sergeant C,” who also interrogated Khadr, was one of the most aggressive interrogators at Bagram and was implicated in the homicide deaths of prisoners there. Kuebler believes that the CID investigation was deliberately “killed” to prevent the military commission proceedings in Khadr’s case from unraveling. So while the prosecution isn't undermining its own case by refusing to hand over documents, the Army is doing what it can to cover up its torture and abuse of detainees. As Amrit said yesterday, "this is what's being presented as American justice."
That's the real shame.
Capital Punishment Project (CPP) Director John Holdridge was interviewed on May 8, 2008, by Jacque Reid of the Tom Joyner Morning Show (TJMS). The TJMS is one of the most influential programs on urban radio. During the segment called "Inside Story with Jacque Reid," John discussed the inherent problems of racial biases and disparities in the United States capital punishment system. Ms. Reid spoke about the release of Levon "Bo" Jones, the 129th person freed from death row since 1973, and a client of the ACLU CPP.
The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL, agreed to the unsealing of the case, and lifted a gag order — finally allowing the Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand. Check out this video for Kahle's story in his own words.
Our website features the documents that were previously sealed in the case. The Internet Archive case is our third challenge to national security letters. We won the last round in our Internet Service Provider case: In September 2007, Judge Victor Marrero struck down the national security letter provision of the Patriot Act, calling the NSL gag power unconstitutional under the First and Fourth Amendments. The government appealed that decision: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in that case, Doe v. Mukasey, in June. You can learn more about all of our national security letter cases at www.aclu.org/nsl.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
The government's prosecution team has been trying to pressure Judge Peter Brownback, the military commission judge at Guantánamo, to hurry along the trial of Omar Khadr, the now-21-year-old Canadian Guantánamo detainee accused of lobbing a grenade that killed U.S. Special Forces medic Christopher Speer. Khadr was 15 when he was captured.
News from Guantánamo this afternoon tells of Brownback expressing frustration with the prosecution for not providing the necessary documentation showing the day-to-day of Khadr's six-year detention at Gitmo. The AP reports: At a pretrial hearing, Judge Peter Brownback, an Army colonel, criticized the prosecution team led by Marine Maj. Jeffrey Groharing for demanding an expedited trial despite failing to obtain the documents from the detention center.
"I have been badgered, beaten and bruised by Maj. Groharing since the 7th of November to set a trial date," Brownback said. "To get a trial date, I need to get discovery done." ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh is in Guantánamo right now overseeing these pre-trial hearings as a human rights observer. She'll have more on today's developments in our DailyKos Diary tomorrow.
Today, she wrote about the pretrial hearing of Mohammed Jawad, another teen who was captured in Afghanistan and has been held at Guantánamo for six years: At the outset of the proceedings, Jawad’s military lawyer, Major David Frakt, informed the military judge, Colonel Peter Brownback, that although Jawad did not believe that he could get justice before the military commission, he had agreed to let Frakt represent him for the sole purpose of challenging the legitimacy and legality of the commission proceedings. Remarkably, when the judge asked government counsel if he had a response, he retorted that he had not anticipated that Jawad would make such an "idiotic request." Although that statement was subsequently withdrawn at the judge’s direction, it was emblematic of the intemperate and contemptuous tone adopted by government counsel throughout the proceedings. So not only did the prosecution insult the defense team, but it showed just how ignorant it is of what is going on with the military commission. Anyone reading the news about Guantánamo knows that several detainees have challenged the legitimacy of these commissions at their hearings. So to not anticipate this…well, that's idiotic.
Lawsuits certainly have a knack for bringing people—and information—out of the woodworks.
In March, the ACLU Racial Justice Program and ACLU of Georgia filed a lawsuit against the Atlanta Independent School System (AISS) and Community Education Partners (CEP), the for-profit company contracted since 2002 to run AISS’s disciplinary alternative school to the tune of almost $7 million a year. The lawsuit accuses the school—whose motto, if you can believe it, is “Be Here, Behave, Be Learning”—of violating students’ constitutional rights to an adequate public education, to be free from unreasonable searches, and to due process when referred to and disciplined at the school. Just some of the fun facts in the case include students being subject to pat-down searches on a daily basis, a prohibition on bringing anything into or out of the school (including keys, combs, pencils, paper, tampons and books), a no homework policy, and a police officer who slammed an innocent student’s head into the wall hard enough that his mother—who was not notified of the incident by the school—had to take him to the hospital.
The AISS-CEP school is yet another example of the school-to-prison pipeline, a national phenomenon that funnels youth of color out of classrooms and into prisons (or prison-like schools) by treating them as dangerous criminals in need of containment rather than students worthy of instruction. The school is also, as a new article by Creative Loafing (Atlanta’s alternative weekly) explains, a product of Republican educational policy, which has favored discipline, privatization, and test-based accountability. CEP’s success, the article suggests, is due not to its capacity to educate youth, but to its ability to use its political ties to win contracts from Texas to Florida to Philadelphia. It should come as no surprise, then, that CEP’s contract in Atlanta was renewed until 2009 shortly after CEP leadership made campaign contributions to four individuals running for the Atlanta Board of Education.
Since the ACLU filed its lawsuit, CEP’s failure to educate students has become a hot topic, and people familiar with the school—from parents to former administrators—have begun to speak out. In addition to the Creative Loafing story, the Atlanta Journal Constitution has published three articles (available here, here and here), NPR covered the issue, the Atlanta Voice and Atlanta Progressive News both ran stories, and a post appeared on Daily Kos. Let’s hope the media spotlight continues to show who is truly misbehaving.
On October 15, 2007, the State of Nevada was set to execute by lethal injection death-row inmate William Castillo, who had abandoned his appeals and volunteered for execution. In late September, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case Baze v. Rees, to decide the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol.
Attempting to prevent Nevada from carrying out an execution that would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the ACLU’s Nevada affiliate, working in conjunction with the Capital Punishment Project, filed an action in the Nevada Supreme Court resulting in the stay of all executions in Nevada. The stay was entered only 90 minutes before Castillo’s scheduled execution.
Castillo has now changed his mind about volunteering for execution and, on May 7, 2008, joined in the ACLU’s challenge of Nevada’s lethal injection execution procedure. Castillo’s attorneys have argued that the case should be sent back to a lower court for a hearing to get details the high court needs to "fully address the constitutionality" of Nevada’s execution protocol.
Lee Rowland of the Nevada ACLU argued the case in the Nevada Supreme Court. “We’re very glad that our lawsuit gave Mr. Castillo the time to reconsider and decide not to volunteer for the death penalty," she said.
The lawsuit comes at a time when the ACLU’s National Prison Project has filed suit challenging Nevada’s grossly inadequate medical care at Ely Prison, which houses the state’s death row.
Last night, Hasan Elahi, an artist and San Jose State professor, was a guest on The Colbert Report. In all his bleach-blond glory, Elahi describes for Colbert the experience of being stopped in a Detroit airport and questioned by the FBI in 2002. (The FBI never confirmed that Elahi's name is on the terrorist watch list…but being stopped and questioned at an airport gives a pretty good indication that he was.) After being cleared of any suspicion, he was told that he had to "check in" with the FBI periodically. He did the FBI one better by creating TrackingTranscience.com, in which he surveils himself in real time—his current location is always available at the website. He also takes hundreds of pictures of his whereabouts and uploads them to the site, so if the FBI wants to know what he had to eat (the man consumes a lot of meat), where he went to the bathroom, or his credit card expenses, it's all online—easy breezy for the FBI to keep track of him! Elahi was the ACLU’s guest last week for “Something to Hide: Artists and Writers Against the Surveillance State, an evening of readings at Joe's Pub during PEN World Voices. Check back here for postings of audio and video from that event.
Today, Noam Biale of our Technology and Liberty Project blogged on TPM Cafe about the ever-growing watch list, which, as we mentioned before, still includes Nelson Mandela. Noam writes: [T]he Watch List continues to grow by 20,000 new names per month, a rate at which we will reach a million names sometime in July. No one believes there are a million terrorists out there; if there were, I’d be writing this from a bomb shelter. So what we have is a list of mostly innocent people, who not only pose no threat to this country, but may be distracting us from the real dangers. An intervention is long past due. Congress needs trim the fat, and put the ever-growing Watch List on a diet.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
This afternoon, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), faxed a subpoena to David Addington, Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff and counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney: Dear Mr. Addington:
As discussed with Counsel to the Vice President Kathryn Wheelbarger, enclosed is a subpoena for your testimony at a hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee on June 26,2008. We appreciate very much the cooperation of you and Ms. Wheelbarger in agreeing to accept service by fax and on the June 26 date for the hearing, and we look forward to your testimony. If you have any questions, problems, or concerns, please direct them to the Judiciary Committee office, 2138 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515 (tel: 202-XXX-XXXX, fax: 202-XXX-XXXX).
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr.
Chairman Finally! After all the abuses and allegations of torture at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, we're hopeful that this June 26 hearing will be a real investigation that focuses on who the real perpetrators are behind the Bush administration's torture policies. And it's time to hold these people accountable.
We continue to call for the appointment of an independent prosecutor (PDF) to investigate these possible torture crimes and the cover-up that ensued. We're asking Congress to give this investigation some teeth, and ensure that the prosecution of crimes isn't all bark, and no bite.
Today, Brian Stull, Staff Attorney for the Capital Punishment Project, blogged in DailyKos about the experience of co-defending Levon "Bo" Jones, who was set free from a North Carolina prison last Friday after being on death row there for 14 years. Brian writes about his trepidation leading up to Bo's release, and the elation upon learning that Bo's case was dismissed: I left work early to take care of my son but kept checking my Blackberry, hoping for news. Finally, at 5:30 p.m., I saw a message from [co-counsel Cassy Stubbs] with the subject line: THEY ARE DISMISSING BO JONES. I have never felt so many emotions at once. I jumped up and down in my kitchen, yelling, "Yes, yes!" My 21-month-old son soon began imitating me, joining in my shouts of glee. And I was soon crying. I think it was for the sheer relief, the sadness for the 14 years on death row that Bo lost, and for how close he came to being executed for a crime he did not commit. The story of Bo Jones' exoneration is on the front page of today's New York Times. The article confronts the two events in the last week that have pushed the death penalty to center stage: Bo's release, and last night's execution of William Earl Lynd, who was the first person to be executed since an unofficial death penalty moratorium gripped state execution chambers anticipating a decision by the Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees, the challenge to the constitutionality of the lethal injection protocol.
You can learn more about the Bo Jones case, and deep flaws in this country's death penalty system, by attending the ACLU Membership Conference from June 8 through 10. There will be panel discussion called "Capital Punishment: Race, Faith and the Courts" on June 9 that will feature Reverend Carroll Pickett, subject of the soon-to-be-released death penalty documentary, "At the Death House Door."
It’s official: the FBI withdrew its national security letter (NSL) demand that it had issued to the Internet Archive last November. NSLs demand personal records like Web site visits and e-mail addresses without prior court approval, and NSL recipients are forbidden, or "gagged," from telling anyone about the demand. So now that the NSL has been withdrawn, the gag has been lifted, and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, can speak freely about his battle to protect Internet Archive users' privacy rights.
Represented by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Kahle sued the FBI for violating the terms of the 2006 Patriot Act reauthorization, which limits the FBI's power to issue NSLs to libraries. Senator John Sununu (R-N.H.) defined the reforms (PDF): What we did in this legislation is add clarifying language that states that libraries operating in their traditional functions: lending books, providing access to digital books or periodicals in digital format, and providing basic access to the Internet would not be subject to a national security letter. There is no National Security Letter statute existing in current law that permits the FBI explicitly to obtain library records. (emphasis ours) But that's exactly what the FBI tried to do. The Internet Archive is a digital library recognized by the state of California. The FBI's NSL demanded personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual’s name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. Sure sounds like overreaching to us.
Something to note: Every time the ACLU has challenged an NSL in court, the FBI has backed down and withdrawn its records request. (Last September, federal district court Judge Victor Marrero struck down the NSL statute of the Patriot Act. The government has appealed the decision; the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in that case, Doe v. Mukasey, in June.) The Internet Archive case is the third instance. This begs the question: if the FBI is so willing to back down and withdraw their request at the first challenge, did they really need to issue an illegal gag in the first place? And what’s wrong with going the normal law enforcement route and getting a warrant?
In a teleconference today, Brewster called being under a gag order and having to sue the FBI in secret "depressing as hell." He continued: "It's depressing that we had to have tens of thousands of dollars worth of pro-bono lawyers fight for us just to be a library."
You can check out all of the documents that were previously sealed in the case at: www.aclu.org/safefree/nationalsecurityletters/internetarchive.html
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Georgia killed a man tonight. When it injected poison into the veins of William Earl Lynd, the state of Georgia restarted the machinery of death, which came to a halt as states awaited a decision in Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of the lethal injection protocol used in Kentucky and other states. The previous execution in this country was on September 25, 2007, when Texas killed Michael Richard. There were many lessons to be learned during this interim death penalty moratorium — none of which, apparently, were heeded.
Georgia executed a man tonight, despite the state of New Jersey having come to the conclusion that it had no alternative other than to abolish the use of the death penalty in the state — conclusions the rest of us could have learned from. We could have learned from New Jersey that, as the state’s study commission said, “[t]he alternative of life imprisonment in a maximum security institution without the possibility of parole would sufficiently ensure public safety and address other legitimate social and penological interests, including the interests of the families of murder victims.”
Georgia killed Lynd tonight despite the fact that that there have been five death row exonerations in this country in just the past 11 months alone — proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this country cannot ensure that innocent people won’t be wrongfully sent to their death. Four of those five exonorees were black, and all were poor. We could have learned that racism is still prevalent in our criminal justice system and that there is no way to guarantee a fair trial in a death penalty case.
Georgia resumed executions even though a recent study by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice showed that capital punishment is “irrelevant to homicide.” This study once again proves capital punishment does not deter murder.
We have not learned from the information gathered during the moratorium. When the death chambers were silent, we could have listened to the screams of the evidence that our capital punishment system is broken. We could have enjoyed our time as a civilized society that does not practice cruelty. Instead, we just waited for word from the High Court and filled up death dockets as fast as we could.
Georgia killed a man tonight. The machinery of death cranked up again, proving we have learned nothing.
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