News & Commentary

By Ana Zamora and Brendan Hamme

The following article first appeared in a report published by CQ Researcher.

By Becca Cramer

Imagine having the moral and legal responsibility to represent over 500 individual children in complex legal proceedings and protect their best interests. These are the impossible circumstances that currently face dependency attorneys in California, as documented in “System on the Brink,” a white paper issued today by the ACLU of California.

Thanks to the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in our Constitution, we have some simple and basic legal rules when it comes to prison health care. Prisons must provide the people in their custody adequate health care. Prisons can’t ignore people’s serious health needs. Decisions about what treatments people need must be made by health care professionals with the necessary expertise, not prison bureaucrats. Prisons can’t have blanket policies that say no one can ever get a certain form of health care, even if doctors say they really, really need it.Yesterday a federal court invoked these very uncontroversial legal principles to rule that California prison officials must provide Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a transgender woman incarcerated at a men’s prison, with gender confirming surgery her doctors and medical experts say she desperately needs.

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department officers shoot members of the public with Tasers hundreds of times each year, with nearly half of those electric shocks resulting in injuries. And on four separate occasions since 2008, individuals have died after sheriff’s deputies tased them multiple times – even though federal guidelines on Taser use warn that “repeated or multiple applications may increase risk of death.”

By Ira Glasser and Norman SiegelThe secret panels deny fairness and frustrate justice

By Allen Hopper, @AHopperACLU