Attorneys representing students and parents at three struggling Los Angeles schools released the following statement in response to the California Court of Appeal’s decision earlier today in Reed v. UTLA.

Officials at California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s North Kern State Prison (NKSP) will no longer limit the access of Muslim inmates to pray, wear specific articles of religious clothing or prohibit them from obtaining prayer oils.  An official with the attorney general’s office announced the change in policy yesterday in a letter to the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC).

A federal appeals court today unanimously ruled that the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the government’s secretive No Fly List should go forward. The national ACLU, along with its affiliates in Oregon, southern California, northern California and New Mexico, filed the lawsuit in June 2010, on behalf of 15 U.S. citizens and permanent residents, including four military veterans, who are on the No Fly List and banned from flying to or from the U.S. or over American airspace, causing great personal hardship. None of the ACLU’s clients have ever been told why they are on the No Fly List or given a reasonable opportunity to get off it. 

The United States Parole Commission has entered into an agreement that all federal inmates eligible for a parole hearing who are incarcerated in prisons in the Central District of California will have that hearing in person rather than by video. The agreement arises from a settlement in a case filed by the ACLU of Southern California and the law firm of Greenberg Glusker.

Today, the ACLU of Southern California, the law firm Bird Marella, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, and USC Law Professor Michael Brennan filed a major civil rights lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court challenging a secret program by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to conceal evidence of deputy assaults on Men’s Central Jail detainees from criminal defense counsel in cases where these deputies are sole or principal prosecution witnesses and a related operation by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office prohibiting disclosure of favorable evidence to criminal defendants, even though such evidence is deemed essential for disclosure by the United States and California Supreme Courts.

Yesterday afternoon, the California State Senate approved AB 1081 – the TRUST Act – with a vote of 21-13. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) is the bill's author; State Senator Kevin de León (D - Los Angeles) served as floor manager for the vote and presented the bill to the Senate.

ACLU of California asks, “How would you change the system?” California’s budget negotiations are an exercise in high stakes tradeoffs.  And as legislators finalize deep cuts to education and the safety net, the ACLU is challenging Californians to acquire a real-time sense of how the state’s bottom line would fare if prisons and jails were placed at the center of the chopping block. 

Today, the ACLU of Southern California and Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen & Dardarian sued the City of Anaheim for violating the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA).