http://www.ocregister.com/articles/injunction-299972-gang-orange.html
By Doug Irving The Orange County Register
Police and prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of dozens of suspected gang members by enforcing a gang injunction against them without first giving them a court hearing, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
The American Civil Liberties Union cheered the ruling as a "major victory" in its two-year fight against the injunction, which targets the Orange Varrio Cypress gang. The Orange County District Attorney's Office is considering an appeal.
The ruling does not change the injunction itself, which prohibits members of the gang from associating with each other in public, wearing gang clothing or being out late at night. But it does challenge how prosecutors and Orange police were using the injunction. Suspected gang members were first notified in February 2009 of the injunction, which created a "safety zone" of nearly four square miles in Old Towne and West Orange. When some of them went to court to challenge their inclusion, the District Attorney's Office dismissed them as named defendants.
But the final injunction targeted the gang as a whole, as well as any members – named or unnamed. Several dozen people who had been dismissed as named defendants were later served with the injunction nonetheless.
That violated their right to fight their case in court, U.S. District Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank ruled. She ordered police and prosecutors not to enforce the injunction against those whose names had been removed from the injunction, fewer than 60 people in all. "The way the District Attorney's Office made these determinations should make the public very nervous," Belinda Escobosa Helzer, director of the ACLU's Orange County office, said in a prepared statement. "This method of cracking down on gangs ensnares innocent victims and threatens to take away their most basic freedoms."
Assistant District Attorney John Anderson had argued that there's nothing unusual about prosecutors adding suspects to a gang injunction after it's already in place. Anyone arrested for breaking the rules of the injunction, he said, could challenge the evidence that put them there when they appear in criminal court.
The judge's ruling that those suspects should have individual hearings before they're included in the injunction "rewrites centuries of injunction law," Anderson said. "It bestows upon criminal street gang members greater constitutional protections than apply to union members, war opponents and anti-abortion protesters," he said.
"The prospects of an appeal are strong," he added.

The federal government’s use of secrecy and deception in the name of national security reached a new low last week, when Obama administration lawyers argued that they had the right to lie to a federal court in the name of national security by denying even the fact that they were keeping secret records about a group of Southern California residents.   While the Court excoriated the government for lying, the Obama administration has defended its actions, raising fears that it will continue the practice in other cases.  Read the Amended Order
The statements arose in the context of a lawsuit brought by several peaceful, law-abiding Southern California Muslims.  They appear to have been the target of government surveillance for years, simply because of their religion.  They sought to learn if the FBI had been targeting them for engaging in peaceful, constitutionally-protected activity.  The individuals, represented by the ACLU of Southern California, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit five years ago for records about the FBI’s surveillance of them.   Read the Complaint
After the groups filed suit, the government released records about them which revealed a disturbing trend -- the FBI had extensively surveilled and documented these groups’ peaceful activities.  For example, the FBI had surveilled their participation in the immigration reform movement, monitored their fundraising activities to support earthquake relief in India, and documented their public statements advocating nonviolence.  While these documents revealed a troubling pattern of FBI surveillance, what they kept hidden seemed equally troubling – large portions of many of the documents were simply blacked out.  Therefore, the ACLU asked the Court to review the complete documents in order to determine if further information could be released.
In response, the government took the remarkable step of lying about the documents they had kept secret -- not only to the Plaintiffs, but also to the Court.  The FBI submitted an extensive brief and declaration by a high-ranking FBI official that, according to the Court, contained “blatantly false” statements about the nature and number of documents that the FBI had kept secret, including lies about whether information had been kept secret and the reasons for that secrecy.  The judge discovered this only because the ACLU had asked him to independently review the FBI’s decision to keep the documents about them secret.
Amazingly, after the Court confronted the government about the lies, the government defended its conduct, claiming not only the authority to keep the information secret, but also to lie – to both the public and the courts - even about the fact that it was keeping the information secret.  Although all of the information at issue is now over five years old, and involves a set of Americans living in Southern California none of whom have ever been arrested, let alone convicted, of any crime in this country, the Obama administration still asserts that disclosing even the fact that there are further documents about these individuals will threaten the national security.
While the court strongly rebuked the government for its conduct, the Obama administration has continued to defend it – going so far as to issue a public statement from the Department of Justice “strongly” disagreeing “with the characterization that the court was misled.”   While we have come to expect such double-speak in government responses, its failure to admit wrongdoing is particularly disturbing in this case, because the district court’s opinion creates no precedent that binds the government in other cases.  As a result, we have no reason to believe that the government is not engaged in similar conduct in cases throughout the nation, or that it will change its practice in response to the court’s order.
Nine years ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a federal court stated that “democracies die behind closed doors,” and ruled in that case that the Bush administration could not hold secret deportation hearings based only on the assertion that the person subject to deportation was of “special interest.” As that court explained, “a true democracy is one that operates on faith — faith that government officials are forthcoming and honest, and faith that informed citizens will arrive at logical conclusions.”  Nearly 10 years later, it's sad that an administration that promised a new era of open government has chosen to close its doors by lying not only to the people, but even to the courts designed to protect us from abuses of power.