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The Best of Days, The Worst of Days
Policies on Indefinite Detention and Military Commissions Raise Concerns
Government Will Not Ask Supreme Court to Review Patriot Act Provision
Join the Discussion on Torture and Accountability
Two Death Row Exonerations in Less than 10 Days. Could Troy Davis Be Next?
California School Bans Sixth Grader's Presentation on Harvey Milk
23 States Push Back Against Unfunded Mandate to Create National ID
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California School Bans Sixth Grader’s Presentation on Harvey Milk
A California school illegally censored sixth grader Natalie Jones’s classroom presentation about Harvey Milk earlier this month. Violating her free speech rights, the school refused to allow her to give the presentation in class. Instead, the school improperly required classmates to get parental permission to see the presentation during a lunch recess.
The assignment, part of an independent research project class, was originally to prepare a written report on any topic. Natalie Jones chose to write about Harvey Milk after watching Sean Penn win an Academy Award for portraying him. Students were then told to make PowerPoint presentations about their reports, which they would show to other students in the class. The day before Natalie was to give her 12-page presentation she was called into the principal’s office and told she couldn’t do so.
“Harvey Milk was an elected official in this state and an important person in history. To say my daughter’s presentation is ‘sex education’ because Harvey Milk happened to be gay is completely wrong,” said Bonnie Jones, Natalie’s mother.
The superintendent of the school said Natalie couldn’t give her presentation because of a district board policy on “Family Life/Sex Education.” A few days later, the school sent letters to parents of students in the class, explaining that her presentation would be held during a lunch recess on May 8, and that students could only attend if they had parental permission.
The ACLU is demanding that the school apologize, give Natalie the opportunity to give her presentation to the full audience and clarify the policy that was improperly used to censor the presentation.
>> Learn more about this case, including copies of Natalie Jones’s presentation on Harvey Milk, the school’s letter to parents, and the Ramona U.S.D. “Family Life/Sex Education” policy.
23 States Push Back Against Unfunded Mandate to Create National ID
Early this month, Minnesota Governor Timothy Pawlenty signed legislation that prohibits his administration from turning the state driver’s license into a national identity card and from imposing new burdens on taxpayers, citizens, immigrants and state government.
Minnesota becomes the 23rd state to reject the Real ID Act of 2005, raising the question of why Congress has not repealed the law.
“23 states have now sent a clear message to Washington that they will not submit to wrongheaded federal mandates that waste state tax dollars and put privacy at risk,” said Christopher Calabrese, Counsel of the ACLU Technology & Liberty Program. “Congress should take notice and repeal the Real ID Act so that effective driver’s license security policy can be developed."
As part of creating a national identification card, the Real ID Act of 2005 also mandates that states hold all Americans' private information in a single database that is accessible to federal and state officials -- the cost and security of which is unknown. Consequently, the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures have expressed strong opposition to the Real ID Act.
Because Real IDs require significantly more background information than a driver’s license, privacy experts fear that the government will now have access to an unprecedented amount of highly sensitive information about citizens and that there will be an exponential rise in identity theft from the database where the information is stored.
>> Learn more about Real ID.
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May 29, 2009
The Best of Days, The Worst of Days
By Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director, ACLU
Tuesday was a day of personal schizophrenia for me.
I woke up on the west coast with news of President Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor as the next associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. My heart swelled with such pride. Over the years, I’ve had occasion to meet Judge Sotomayor and watched her ascent in judicial circles with such pride.
Perhaps my veneration and personal belief in Judge Sotomayor come from the fact that she and I have a similar "pedigree" of sorts. We’re both of Puerto Rican descent, from public housing projects in the Bronx. We both went to Princeton, she went to Yale Law School. I was only wait-listed at Yale, and opted to go to Stanford Law School instead.
Over the years, I watched from afar as she broke one glass ceiling after another. And Tuesday felt like the culmination of not just one remarkable woman’s career, but of the sacrifices of generations of immigrant parents who struggled to give their kids a chance at achieving the pinnacle of the American dream. "Que dios me la bendiga"-- may god bless her -- my grandmother would have said on Judge Sotomayor’s behalf. And grandma was always right.
Then three hours later, my mood worsened. As one glass ceiling was being shattered and as America was overcoming centuries of discrimination against women and Latinos, one other ceiling was being reinforced with concrete and steel over the heads of gay and lesbian couples in California.
As proud as I was to be a lawyer in the morning, I was disgusted at my profession this afternoon. How could any judge -- or any lawyer -- not understand what Prop 8 was really about? What is the role of the judiciary if it is not to protect the minority from the whims of the majority? I sat in the courtroom that day when Prop 8 was argued, as I watched judges and lawyers struggle in legal speak as they tried to rationalize a decision to take away people’s rights. Was Proposition 8 an amendment or a revision to the state constitution? The first case that granted us full civil rights was a case of first impression. This second case that took away our new-found rights wasn’t a case of first impression. The people have spoken. I guess I just have to lump my civil rights. The majority speaks…
>>Read the rest of Anthony's blog post. 
>>Watch Matt Coles, Director of the ACLU’s LGBT project, discuss how the Prop 8 decision affects all Americans, and then share this with your friends.
Policies on Indefinite Detention and Military Commissions Raise Concerns
Last week, in front of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights at the National Archives, President Obama spoke movingly about respect for the Constitution, about the critical importance of due process, and about the violation of American values that torture represents.
Yet, we have serious concerns with the president’s assertion that modifying Bush-era military commissions can solve their basic injustice. Any system designed to produce a pre-ordained outcome -- rather than a free and fair trial -- is irreparably unjust.
“The proposed changes to the military commissions are merely cosmetic and do not erase the spectacle of the Department of Defense presiding over trials where coerced statements and accusations by unnamed accusers are permitted, and where detainees are not permitted to speak about their torture at the hands of the CIA or the military,” said Denny LeBoeuf, Director of the ACLU’s John Adams Project, assisting in the representation of capitally-charged detainees.
Furthermore, creating a system of indefinite detention -- holding detainees for years without charge or trial -- would be fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution. As ACLU National Security Project director Jameel Jaffer said about the proposed “preventive detention” system, “If they cannot be convicted, then you release them. That’s what it means to have a justice system.”
The ACLU will continue to hold firm in defense of core principles. We will keep working to totally dismantle the Bush system of injustice and to create an America we can be proud of again.
>>Listen to a podcast with ACLU attorney Ben Wizner and Glen Greenwald of Salon.com discussing President’s Obama’s speech, the implications of the proposed changes to military commissions and so-called “preventive detention” system.
Government Will Not Ask Supreme Court to Review Patriot Act Provision
Last week, the government announced that it will not ask the Supreme Court to review a decision that struck down a Patriot Act provision that allows the government to impose unconstitutional gag orders on recipients of national security letters (NSLs).
NSLs issued by the FBI require Internet Service Providers to turn over sensitive information about their clients and subscribers. In 2007, a lower court ruled that the gag order provisions were unconstitutional, and an appeals court upheld that ruling in 2008. The government's time for petitioning the Supreme Court for review has now expired.
This means that FBI gag orders will finally be subject to meaningful judicial review, which will put a much-needed check on abuse of this intrusive surveillance and gag power.
The ACLU filed this lawsuit in 2004 on behalf of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that the FBI served with an NSL. The NSL demanded sensitive subscriber information and prohibited the ISP from disclosing to anyone that the FBI had demanded information from it. “John Doe,” the NSL recipient, remains gagged and the ACLU is still prohibited from disclosing our client’s identity.
Since the government has decided not to seek Supreme Court review, it now has to defend to a judge the constitutionality of the gag order on "John Doe." The FBI continues to enforce the gag order even though the underlying investigation is more than five years old and may well have ended, and even though the FBI abandoned its demand for records from the ISP more than two years ago. At this point is seems clear that this unwarranted and unconstitutional gag order serves no legitimate purpose.
>>Learn more about the case and NSLs.
Join the Discussion on Torture and Accountability
The month of June is “Torture Awareness Month,” and throughout the month, the ACLU will be hosting an online forum at the ACLU's Blog of Rights on the subject of torture and accountability.
Join this important discussion by sending in your questions. Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project will address your questions on June 26, the anniversary of the date that the UN Convention Against Torture came into effect.
Two Death Row Exonerations within the Last Month. Could Troy Davis Be Next?
Last week saw the exoneration of the 132nd person from death row since 1973. Paul House, who was on death row for 22 years and was scheduled for a new hearing, was exonerated after a DNA test proved he was not the perpetrator of the murder he was convicted of in 1986. Daniel Wade Moore became the 133rd exoneree when he was acquitted at a retrial for a 1999 rape and murder. Given the vast amount of people released from death row in the last 35 years, it is clear that capital punishment in the United States is fatally flawed and there is the unconscionable possibility to execute an innocent person. Troy Davis, who is almost certainly innocent, should have a chance to make the list of the exonerated. Instead, no court has heard evidence of his innocence.
Last Tuesday was the Global Day of Action for Troy Davis, who has been on Georgia’s death row since 1989. The facts of Davis’s case indicate that he is almost certainly innocent: Convicted and sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of Officer Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, Davis’s case lacks any physical evidence, and no murder weapon has been found. The only evidence against Davis is the testimony of witnesses. But seven of the nine non-police witnesses have recanted or contradicted their trial testimony. Of the two witnesses who did not recant, one is an alternative suspect.
>>Act now. Write Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm and ask him to reopen the investigation of Troy Davis.
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