News & Commentary

This week marks the 27th celebration of Banned Books Week, a national event promoted by the American Library Association (ALA) celebrating the freedom to read.

We have blogged about the invasive new border search policies that allow copying of books, documents and data, as well as intrusive questioning, all without probable cause and in conflict with decades of legal precedents.

In case you missed it on our National ACLU blog, here is an entry written by the ACLU's Matt Bors about federal policies that allow DHS to search international travelers without consent or any suspicion of wrongdoing:

Would you allow a stranger to sift through your purse or wallet and take your driver's license? Would you want your children or grandchildren to tell passers-by on the street what school they attend or their student ID numbers?

"My greatest hope for Robby is that he will just grow up accepting and loving himself," said his mother, Tracy Martinazzi, who took on a school district -- and a way of thinking -- that allowed her son to be the victim of name-calling, taunts, and, finally, brutal physical abuse based on his sexual orientation.

"I can't remember a day at school when I wasn't called a faggot or gay," said Robby Martinazzi. Throughout elementary and middle school, Robby had been the target of taunts, physical abuse, and name-calling based on his sexual orientation. After years of asking officials at his Lake County school district to intervene, Robby's parents called the ACLU of Northern California.

The rights of two African-American students were violated when they were expelled from Deer Valley High School following an off-campus incident in which police officers pepper-sprayed the students and forcefully arrested them, a judge ruled in May 2008. The judge overturned the expulsions.

In 2001, an African-American student at Grace Davis High School in Modesto was involved in a fight with another student over race–the other student called him a "nigger." While the black student was suspended for more than a month and then transferred to another school, the white student was suspended only briefly.

It was a child's simple refusal to give up a bandana belonging to his recently deceased grandfather that led to a landmark settlement regarding discriminatory discipline against Native-American students at the hands of the Bishop Union Elementary School District (BUESD).

Bishop, located in the eastern Sierras, has a population of about 3,400, with approximately 1,500 members of the Paiute Tribe living on a nearby reservation.

Violent Incident
In October 2005, a campus police officer, also known as a school resource officer (SRO), demanded that an eighth-grader hand over the bandana he was wearing, citing the school's dress code.