News & Commentary

Students in all of California’s public schools deserve at least these basic necessities for educational opportunity. The plaintiffs in the historic Williams v. California lawsuit fought for this principle, and on September 29, 2004, when legislation implementing the settlement agreement was signed into law, they helped to usher in a new era for public education in California.

The facts prove that life in prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP) is swift, severe, and certain punishment. The reality is that people sentenced to LWOP have been condemned to die in prison and that’s what happens: They die in prison of natural causes, just like the majority of people sentenced to death. The differences: Sentencing people to death by execution is three times more expensive than sentencing them to die in prison. And if we make a mistake by sentencing an innocent person to death, it can’t be fixed.

By all accounts Kyle Thompson is a typical kid from Michigan, but after a misunderstanding with his teacher, Kyle was led from school in handcuffs, was expelled and had to spend the year under house arrest.

For years, we at the ACLU have been warning that the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative – a vast information sharing program that encourages the collection and sharing of “suspicious activity” among private parties and local, state and federal law enforcement – would lead to violations of our privacy, racial and religious profiling, and interference with constitutionally-protected activities. Today, we’re proving ourselves right by unveiling actual Suspicious Activity Report summaries obtained from California fusion centers (post-9/11 intergovernmental surveillance hubs). We are also joined by 26 other organizations in calling on the Justice Department, FBI and two other agencies responsible for Suspicious Activity Reporting to adopt stricter standards so that individuals’ innocent activity will cease being reported, shared and maintained for decades in anti-terrorism databases.

In 1942, San Leandro draftsman Fred Korematsu was jailed for refusing to obey President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 ordering all citizens of Japanese descent to report to relocation centers. Korematsu and his fiancée had intended to leave California to marry.

Yesterday morning the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument in the ACLU of Northern California’s lawsuit with the Electronic Frontier Foundation against Proposition 35. I told the court that Proposition 35 is too broad and violates the First Amendment. As the federal district court has already held, it affects too much protected speech, on too many websites, by too many people who don’t pose a risk of re-offending.

It's been fifty years since the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. There are still many steps in this country's long march from slavery toward equality and racial justice.

The American Civil Liberties Union of California is encouraged by Sen. Darrell Steinberg's proposal, announced today, to reject Gov. Jerry Brown's call for prison expansion and to instead seek lasting solutions to California's overincarceration crisis that will also make our communities safer. As several members of the Senate Democratic Caucus acknowledged at a press conference this morning, mass incarceration has taken a substantial toll on California's communities and it's time to do something different.

Yesterday, the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights dismissed three complaints that had been filed against the University of California, on the grounds that the complaints were based on constitutionally protected speech. The complaints had alleged that the activities of students critical of Israel's policies had created a hostile environment for Jewish students at the Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Irvine campuses. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California became involved because the complaint raised two important, and sometimes conflicting, rights: the right of students to attend university free from a pervasive hostile environment based on their race or religion, and the right of students to speak out strongly on campus about controversial political issues.