For me, the new year is an occasion to reflect on the triumphs and disappointments of the year past, to renew my goals and commitments, and to resolve again to face the new challenges and opportunities in the year ahead. This New Year’s Eve, I am toasting to life.
In North Carolina, where our office is based, death sentences dropped dramatically in 2008: only one man was sent to death row as juries across the state resoundingly voted in favor of life sentences. Not one person was executed. Two innocent men left North Carolina’s death row and stepped on free soil, including our client Bo Jones. For the first time in over 16 years, Bo spent the holiday season at home with his family.
Other death penalty states saw similar declines in death sentences and executions. Across the country, only some 112 defendants were sentenced to death, down dramatically from the average of about 300 seen in the 1990s. In Harris County, Texas, traditionally labeled "the capital of capital punishment," not one person was sentenced to death. Additionally, 2008 saw the lowest number (37) of executions in 14 years, only one of which occurred outside the South. The Supreme Court refused to find that Kentucky’s method of lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment, but in the same term, it rejected the death penalty for non-homicide crimes.
States across the country are acknowledging the exorbitant costs of administering the death penalty, especially in times of perilous budget shortfalls. New Jersey, just over a year into its abolition of the death penalty, seems to have no regrets. Doctors across the country — and just last week in Washington — are renewing their commitment to the Hippocratic Oath and refusing to play any part in ending a life. It is my wish for 2009 that we continue to witness these hopeful trends and see justice for all those under sentence of death.
Today, I toast all of the steadfast advocates, in the field of capital punishment and beyond, who have fought, often in the face of great personal, professional, and public adversity, for the lives and rights of society’s most vulnerable members, whom so many would cast aside. I reflect on all those who have lost their loved ones to homicide and execution and hope that this new year will bring them peace. And I celebrate all of the lives saved in 2008; for those on death row as well as for those facing the death penalty, every new day is a victory.
Prop. 8 in California wasn’t the only anti-gay initiative that passed on election day. Voters in Arkansas also passed an initiative prohibiting any cohabiting adult from adopting a child or becoming a foster parent. Since Arkansas passed a ban on marriage for same-sex couples four years earlier, the law effectively excludes anyone in a same-sex relationship. Yesterday, the ACLU’s LGBT Project filed a lawsuit in state court in Little Rock challenging the initiative (you can read the complaint here).
The initiative should be struck down, the case says, for two reasons. First, it is bad for children because, in a state with many more children than prospective foster and adoptive parents, it denies them homes. Second, it interferes with family, by keeping gay people from building families and by keeping straight parents from asking gay and straight cohabiting couples to step in for them as parents should something happen.
The case against the initiative is framed by the people for whom it was brought, and, of course, by the federal and state constitutions.
Sheila Cole is one of the plaintiffs. She and her partner of nine years live in Tulsa. Sheila’s daughter had a baby girl in May. The baby is now in protective custody in Bentonville, Arkansas, after being taken to a hospital with multiple broken ribs when she was about 2 months old. Sheila asked the state to let her granddaughter join her in Tulsa, and offered to become her foster mother. Every week, she drives four hours to spend time with the baby. The state of Oklahoma did a home study and approved. Her application was pending with the Arkansas Department of Human Services when the initiative passed.
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Cary Kelley and his wife Trina are also plaintiffs. Cary’s mother Vickie Kelley lives across the road from them with Sophia Estes, her partner of 16 years. Cary was a passenger in car wreck that killed his brother 9 years ago. His wife is a product of the foster care system. They want to be sure that if anything happens to them, their two young daughters will be taken care of. They’d be sure of that if they knew that Vickie and Sophie, who have a close relationship with the kids, would be allowed to step in and adopt. But since Vickie and Sophie are a same-sex couple, they can’t.
Stephanie Huffman and Wendy Rickman, also part of the case, are professors at the University of Central Arkansas. They’ve been together 10 years. In 2003, the state had them take in a hearing-impaired two-year-old with serious learning disabilities. The state approved his adoption the next year. Wendy gave birth in 2003, and they are raising the two boys as brothers. They’d like to adopt again, and would welcome another special needs child. That’s off the table now.
The constitution, the case says, requires the state to act in the best interests of children who, like Sheila’s granddaughter and Stephanie’s son, it has taken into custody. Excluding capable parents who can give children a home does the reverse. The constitution, the case also says, requires the state to let people like Stephanie and Wendy form families. It can’t penalize them for that without any good reason.
And there is no good reason to exclude gay people, or other cohabiting couples, from being foster parents or adopting. In 1999, the ACLU challenged an earlier rule banning gay people from becoming foster parents. In that challenge, the court heard from leading authorities on child welfare and parenting, all of whom testified that sexual orientation has nothing to do with ability to parent. They refuted every conceivable argument for the ban, from claims that same-sex relationships are unstable to claims that gay people are child abusers.
A unanimous Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the state agency that issued the rule banning foster parenting didn’t have the legal authority to do something so clearly not in the best interest of children. The initiative passed this year was designed to provide the state the authority to act against the best interests of its children. When the new case comes to trial, we’ll be back once again with the nation’s leading authorities on child welfare. After hearing them, we hope the courts will agree that the constitution doesn’t allow the state to do something so clearly against a child’s best interest either.
Want to learn more about the rights of LGBT parents? Please visit Get Busy, Get Equal!
Earlier this month the NYCLU co-hosted an event in the Bronx to discuss the challenges facing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families. The well-attended event took place at the Bronx Community Pride Center, which is in the district of state senator Ruben Diaz, a staunch gay marriage foe. Using footage from the event, the NYCLU extended an olive branch to Senator Diaz today through a YouTube new year’s card. Click on the YouTube player below to watch Senator Diaz’s constituents explain what it’s like to be LGBT in the Bronx.
Today the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the state of Arkansas’ newly passed Act 1. Slated to take effect January 1, Act 1 bans any unmarried person who lives with a partner from serving as an adoptive or foster parent in the state. In our lawsuit, we argue that Act 1 violates the federal and state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process. Read the release.
Especially at this time of year, my mother taught me, we should not forget the poor. We should not forget those who cannot afford a place to sleep or food to eat, much less the holiday trimmings many people take for granted. There are some injustices that result from poverty that don’t always come to mind, but that also need attention. One is the erroneous imposition of the death penalty for defendants who are poor and cannot afford effective lawyers. While never appropriate, the use of the death penalty should certainly not depend on how much money the accused possesses, and our government should not wrongly execute people because they lack the means to adequately defend themselves.
Empirical studies have repeatedly found that erroneous death sentences most often result from incompetent lawyering, which disproportionately affects the poor. Under Supreme Court rulings, a death sentence cannot be upheld unless the jury imposing it has had an opportunity to consider all pertinent “compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind.” But most often, death sentences result because unprepared and under-funded defense attorneys utterly fail to learn of and present to the jury such mitigating and compassionate factors.
For example, a Tennessee jury sentenced Gaile Owens to death for having her husband murdered without the jury ever having heard that the husband brutally sexually abused her over a period of thirteen years. In one incident during one of her pregnancies, his brutality caused her placenta to detach partially, resulting in an emergency C-section. The jury heard none of this evidence due to defense counsel’s failure to investigate, a key issue in Ms. Owens’ pending appeal. Appointed counsel for Ms. Owens completed time sheets stating that counsel conducted a scant two-hour investigation in preparation for the mitigation or sentencing phase of Ms. Owens’ trial. That is not justice.
This year, poor people receive an extra lump of coal in their stockings. In one of its final moves before it leaves office, the Department of Justice under the Bush administration recently promulgated final regulations that will speed the path to execution for people like Ms. Owens. Under these regulations, promulgated pursuant to President Bush’s Patriot Act II, states will be permitted to radically shorten the amount of time that many death penalty prisoners have to seek federal habeas corpus review of their cases, if the states can meet requirements for adequate representation of poor death-row inmates that many experts have called a “a sham and a ruse.”
Unless the new Patriot Act regulations are reversed, our government may execute poor death-row inmates like Ms. Owens without providing them a crucial federal review of egregious errors in their cases such as their attorneys’ woefully inadequate representation. One day, like Mr. Scrooge viewing the ghosts of Christmas past, Americans will look back with shame on this period in which poverty played a decisive role in determining who lives and who dies.
I’m writing to tell you about a very important parenting case that is now in the Court of Appeals in Tennessee. Here’s the story.
Angel Chandler and Joseph Baker divorced ten years ago. They had two children, a daughter, now 13 and a son, now 15. They had joint custody and visitation with both children. Ms. Chandler began seeing the woman who became her partner nine years ago, and Mr. Baker married the woman who is now his wife in 2003.
Earlier this year, Ms. Chandler and Mr. Baker went to family court to get approval for a modification of their parenting plan. Following usual procedure, the court ordered an evaluation of both homes. The evaluation said that Ms. Chandler’s partner was a positive influence, and had a "parent-like" relationship with both of the children.
Nevertheless, the court put what Tennessee law calls a "paramour" restriction in its order approving the new parenting plan. The order barred Ms. Chandler’s partner from their home on any night when either of the children are there. Since Ms. Chandler’s daughter spends most of her time there, that meant that Ms. Chandler’s partner had to move out of their home.
To maintain some semblance of their life but comply with this ridiculous order, Ms. Chandler quit her job, and she and her partner moved to North Carolina, where they could maintain two households. Ms. Chandler’s partner now sleeps in the second household whenever one of the children is present–which is most nights.
Ms. Chandler has a very clear constitutional right to raise her children as she thinks best. And like the court-appointed expert, she thinks it would be best if her children could be in a home with both their mother and their mother’s partner. Ms. Chandler also has a very clear constitutional right to love and have a relationship with another adult.
The courts can’t interfere with either of those rights without a very good reason, and there is no good reason here, where the court’s own expert recommended that this family be left alone.
I wish I could say that this case was a quirk, but orders like these are not at all uncommon, particularly in the South. Judges often deny that they are discriminatory, saying that they apply equally to unmarried gay people and unmarried heterosexuals. In a state like Tennessee, which constitutionally bans marriage for same-sex couples, that would qualify as a bad joke if families weren’t being broken up. We hope to convince the Tennessee Court of Appeals to strike this order down, and give us the kind of strong decision we can use to start getting rid of similar orders throughout the region.
As always, I’ll keep you posted.
Read our press release
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(Originally posted on The Bilerico Project)
Martin Gill and his partner have been raising two foster children in Florida since December 2004. When a judge terminated the parental rights of the boys’ biological parents in 2006, Martin, with the help of the ACLU, moved to adopt them. While the state of Florida allows gay people to be foster parents, adoption by gay people has been banned for over two decades. On November 25, a juvenile court judge granted Martin’s adoption request, striking down the ban on gay adoptions in Florida.
I guess we’ve always been big on celebrating Christmas. Two weeks before Christmas in 2004, we got a call from the Department of Children and Families. They asked us to take in two more foster kids. I said no, as we were planning to move to Georgia, and I didn’t want to take in kids if they’d have to be uprooted again because of our move.
The social worker said they just needed a place for about a month, as a family member had agreed to take them, but first had to go through an approval process. I still said no. She said we were the only home in the agency with any space left. Then she said, "I bet you could give them a really nice Christmas."
I knew she was right; we could give them a great Christmas. The story of Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, flashed through my mind. For us, Christmas had never been a time to turn away those in need and I really hated the thought that these two might have to spend Christmas in a shelter.
"Okay, we’ll take them—but only if they’re temporary." I said, thinking of the house we had just bought in Georgia.
They arrived two hours later, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs—even those clothes were dirty, tattered and didn’t fit.
On Christmas day, there were 20 people over for dinner. By that evening, they had filled the kids’ closet and their dressers with new clothes. The playpen, which we made into a makeshift toy box, was now overflowing with new toys. It made no difference that the case worker had said their placement was for only one month—they couldn’t have been treated any more like family had they been our biological kids.
To that end I am grateful for our generous family and friends, who have always been supportive of our decision to foster and more recently to adopt. And in return, our friends know they never have to spend Christmas alone. They can always come spend it with us and the kids.
What was supposed to be a temporary placement in 2004 is now a big part of what we call our family. Because of these boys, we sold the house in Georgia and made the choice to stay here in Miami. With the adoption approved, we have so much to be thankful for this Christmas. We’ll be celebrating it right here at home with family and friends. It will be our fifth big Christmas with these two boys we now call our sons.
In this year of market melt-downs and layoffs, we have decided to put an emphasis on helping others in need. We are volunteering this year with Angels Everywhere (a part of our church, Unity on the Bay). While people are often generous with donations for the little kids, teenagers often come to toy giveaways and go home empty handed (or get toys intended for much younger kids). So my partner has been working diligently with our foster agency to get some gifts especially for the teens there. Our three kids will be there helping to give out gifts, in hopes that they too can learn the joy of giving.
And isn’t that the reason for the season?
Immediately after Martin’s adoption was granted, Florida’s attorney general filed a notice of appeal. To find out more about the case, watch a video of the Gill family and keep up on the latest developments, visit www.aclu.org/gill.
Related:
Something to Be Thankful For
VICTORY: Florida Law Barring Gay People from Adopting Ruled Unconstitutional
Decision Tomorrow in Challenge to Florida’s Ban on Adoption by Gay People
Lisa Valentine’s arrest on Tuesday is yet another example of the discrimination that Muslim women who wear hijab (headscarves) face on a daily basis. Valentine was told that she could not enter the courthouse in Douglasville, Georgia, unless she removed her hijab, and was jailed for contempt of court when she refused to do so. “I just felt stripped of my civil, my human rights,” the AP reported Valentine saying. The ACLU of Georgia has expressed grave concern over policies that deny court access to Muslim women and followers of other faiths who wear religious headgear.
Muslim women and girls have been prohibited from wearing their headcoverings in a number of contexts. They have been fired from jobs, thrown off school sports teams, denied access to public places, and otherwise discriminated against because they wear hijab.
This isn’t just a Muslim issue. This is also a women’s rights and a human rights issue, because when Muslim women are denied the right to wear hijab, it’s a statement that they are not free to choose how to express their beliefs. In a moving video we’ve just released, ACLU client, Jameelah Medina, spoke about her experience of being forced to remove her hijab in jail in San Bernardino County, California, and how it ignited her activism:
“How many times have we experienced discrimination or hate because we’re a woman, because we’re a Muslim woman…? But we don’t speak up, we just accept it, and we say, ‘Someone else will do it; someone else will stand up and they’ll make a difference, then I’ll join that fight.’ …I look forward to working with and… inspiring other women: whatever the issue is in your communities, that you stand up and say, ‘I’m going to be the one.’”
Jameelah gave this inspiring speech at a conference sponsored in November by the ACLU Human Rights Program entitled, “Keeping Your Faith in Post 9/11 America: Religious and Ethnic Discrimination and Human Rights,” where advocates and members of the Muslim community gathered to discuss the various rights violations that Muslims have faced in recent years. Jameelah also blogged recently on Feministing about what wearing hijab means to her and why being forced to remove it was such a violation of her rights as a woman, generating quite a lively discussion.
To learn more about Muslim women’s rights and other hijab cases the ACLU has handled, check out www.aclu.org/muslimwomen.
President-elect Barack Obama offered Americans a unique opportunity to directly relay their concerns to the incoming administration when his change.gov website unveiled its “Open for Questions” tool late last week. The result of that tool’s first round of voting may have surprised Obama and his staff: two of the top ten questions –including the highest ranking question – concerned marijuana policy and questions that challenged the drug war in general took 16 of the top 50 spots. Many were disappointed, though unsurprised, by the administration’s response to the question that landed in the top slot. When asked whether or not he would “consider legalizing marijuana so that the government [could] tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs [and] a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.,” Obama’s team responded with a resounding “no,” stating simply that the President-elect “is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.”
Though Obama previously voiced his tentative support for marijuana decriminalization and ending federal raids on state-sanctioned medical marijuana providers, he has never spoken in favor of all-out legalization. Indeed, had Obama answered the question affirmatively, he would have broken with a powerful, 40-year-old political tradition that requires government representatives to endorse strictly prohibitionist, punitive drug policies despite mounting evidence of their inefficacy in order to avoid appearing “soft on crime.”
The administration’s dismissive response fails to acknowledge the degree to which marijuana law reform is at its heart not really about marijuana at all, but rather about how we want to spend our increasingly limited financial resources and how much government intrusion into our private lives we are willing to allow. As a nation, we currently spend billions of dollars launching propagandistic, counterproductive anti-marijuana media campaigns; funding inefficient, abusive law enforcement tactics; and locking up otherwise law-abiding citizens. Ending this irrational, costly and constitutionally corrosive war on marijuana would free up that money for use in improving education, providing access to healthcare, and rebuilding America’s outdated transportation and public infrastructure – all of which Obama vowed to prioritize during his successful bid for the White House.
Despite his uninspiring response to the question of marijuana legalization, those interested in alternatives to the “war on drugs” should not give up hope that Obama might approach drug-related issues in a more responsible, ethical, and thoughtful way than have his predecessors. On his transition website, Obama promises outright to eliminate sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine offenses, expand the use of drug courts, and offer more comprehensive support services for ex-offenders – including substance abuse and mental health counseling. Moreover, Obama’s willingness to engage ordinary citizens through interactive, web-based communication tools like “Open for Questions” stands in sharp contrast to the lack of transparency and accountability that has characterized the outgoing administration. If nothing else, concerned Americans can rest assured that their dissatisfaction with our current drug policies has been brought to the attention of the incoming President. And if you have yet to voice your opposition to the “war on drugs” or any other pressing civil liberties concerns facing the Obama administration, change.gov will re-launch its “Open for Questions” tool within days of this post!
Remember the Long Island millionaire couple convicted of enslaving two domestic workers they had brought to the U.S. from Indonesia? Although this story got much more media attention than other similar occurrences, it is far from an isolated event.
An estimated 100 million women, mostly from the world’s lesser-developed countries, leave their homes each year and migrate abroad in the hopes of finding a better life. Many of these female migrants turn to domestic work as a means of supporting themselves and their families back home. Unfortunately, language barriers, immigration status, isolation in the home, lack of education, and gender make these women extremely vulnerable and a serious pattern of exploitation and abuse of migrant domestic workers exists around the world. From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, South America to the United States, female domestic workers are routinely trafficked and subjected to conditions of forced labor and servitude.
Among the most vulnerable migrant domestic workers are those employed by diplomats, who enslave, exploit, and abuse domestic workers – and often get away with it because they have diplomatic immunity. Diplomats’ homes (to which domestic workers are often confined) are off-limits to U.S. law enforcement and special visa arrangements give diplomats a great deal of power over workers’ ability to remain in this country.
Last week, Congress took an important step forward in addressing this issue when it passed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), which includes specific protections for domestic workers brought to the U.S. by foreign diplomats. However, as long as diplomats remain immune to criminal and civil liability, exploitation and abuse will continue and victims will have little recourse.
In honor of International Migrants Day, we urge the U.S. government to implement the TVPRA provisions and to do more to protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all migrants by taking steps to sign and ratify the Migrant Worker Convention.
To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.
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