News & Commentary

By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project With an opinion yesterday from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, ACLU client Max Soffar moves a step closer to an unjust execution.  And, little more than one year after the execution of Troy Davis, our system moves closer to another miscarriage of justice. 

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project The ACLU of Michigan recently put out an interesting report on surveillance cameras. Like other ACLU reports on cameras (such as those by our affiliates in Illinois and Northern California, and the materials on our national site) it summarizes the policy arguments against cameras. But it also focuses on a uniquely disturbing application of surveillance cameras: their deployment in residential neighborhoods.

By Michael Cummings, New York Civil Liberties Union at 12:54pm In New York’s prisons, people caught with too many postage stamps in their cells can land a stint in extreme isolation – the harshest possible punishment in the state prison system.

By Yaman Salahi, Arthur Liman fellow This is the second in a two-part series of posts covering the impact of proposed changes to two major Los Angeles Police Department programs related to intelligence-gathering. Do you know who your Facebook friends are? Now that the Los Angeles Police Commission has approved new guidelines that allow LAPD to vastly expand its online spying operations, you should think twice.

A bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown this weekend will help ensure that public school districts don't charge students illegal fees to participate in educational activities.

By Joey Hernández, LGBTQ Student Rights Advocate

By Michael Kaufman, Staff Attorney A Democratic consultant ignited a firestorm several months ago when she questioned whether Ann Romney – who had tweeted that raising five children had been “hard work” – had “actually worked a day in her life.” Commentators from both sides of the aisle roundly criticized the consultant. The message was clear: taking care of a family is real work, and our society should value domestic work as much as paycheck-earning employment.

Revelations of brutality by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies and cover-ups inside the jails have exposed significant shortcomings in the department's civilian watchdog system, which was created to prevent such misconduct.

The Obama administration has been ordered to give immigrants bail hearings if they've been detained in the L.A. area for more than six months. That's fair. U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. last week ordered the Obama administration to provide bail hearings for certain immigrants who have been detained in Southern California for more than six months to determine whether their continued detention is warranted. Hatter's decision is a welcome development that could help restore some much-needed fairness to the troubled detention system. We hope the administration accepts the court's ruling.