News & Commentary

Because the city of Santa Monica has stopped using vaguely worded camping ordinances as a pretext to round up homeless people, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP have agreed to drop a lawsuit against the city over its homeless policies, the legal team announced today. Among the provisions of the settlement are that no one should be forced out of his or her community simply for being homeless; that all communities need to provide a reasonable amount of shelter beds and serves; and public safety personnel must be adequately trained to interact with homeless people.

The ACLU of Southern California’s Chief Counsel, Mark Rosenbaum, will testify before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on the unconstitutionality of Arizona’s AB 1070. The board is set to vote today on whether to support a boycott of Arizona in response to the new law requiring that police demand "papers" from people they stop and suspect are not authorized to be in the U.S.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – A report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union shows that overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that have plagued the jail for more than 30 years still persist, along with an apparent culture of violence and fear, including prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and the use of excessive force by deputies.

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, was the first civic leader to call for Gates to resign in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and Gates sometimes referred to her as “Ramona Ripoff.” The following is a statement from Ripston on his death:

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Five days after a team of civil rights lawyers filed lawsuits on behalf of two immigrants with mental disabilities who were locked up for years after being judged mentally incompetent to understand the proceedings against them, federal officials announced the two men would be released from custody.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – For five years, two men with mental disabilities have languished in immigration detention, effectively lost in a system that has no established procedures to determine whether they should be released or whether their cases should be resolved in another way.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – The ACLU of Southern California is disturbed by recent reports that two LAPD gang officers fatally shot an unarmed, 27-year-old autistic man in Koreatown on March 20th.

The Supreme Court heard argument earlier this week in Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, an extremely important First Amendment case involving the criminal prohibition on so-called "material support" to designated terrorist organizations.