Enacting Justice: 2008 Legislative Priorities

In the second year of a two-year legislative session, the ACLU-NC’s top priorities reflect our sense that even in a tight budget year, we can gain ground in a number of our core areas. The following bills call for stemming wrongful convictions, ensuring access to disaster-relief services, and protecting Californians from increasing violations of personal privacy. Included below are new bills as well as familiar bills that stalled or failed in prior years.

Stopping Wrongful Convictions

These bills propose much needed reforms to minimize wrongful convictions by addressing the three leading causes of wrongful convictions in the United States: reliance on uncorroborated testimony from “in-custody” informants, false confessions, and erroneous eyewitness identifications. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice sponsored the bills, which Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed last year:

SB 1589 (Romero, D-Los Angeles)
Would prohibit conviction based on the uncorroborated testimony of an in-custody informant.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status:  Vetoed by the governor

SB 1590 (Alquist, D-San Jose)  
Would have required that police interrogations in cases involving homicides or other violent felonies be recorded electronically. Electronic recording would help reduce the number of false confessions.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Died in Senate Appropriations Committee

SB 1591 (Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles)
Would have required the Department of Justice to develop voluntary guidelines for eyewitness identification procedures for all California law enforcement agencies.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Died in Senate Appropriations Committee

Providing Justice for the Wrongfully Convicted

AB 2937 (Solorio, D-Santa Ana)
Would ensure that exonerees have the same access to resources that ex-offenders receive; clarify the statute of limitations to file damages claims; ensure that criminal records relating to wrongful convictions are sealed; and adjust the amount of compensation for wrongful convictions to reflect federal standards. Also known as the Arthur Carmona Justice for the Wrongfully Convicted Act.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Vetoed by the governor

Championing Accurate, Un-Biased Sex Ed

SB 1600 (Kuehl, D-Santa Monica)
Would have required charter schools that choose to teach sex education to follow the same standards as public schools. (In 2003, the ACLU sponsored SB 71, which required sexual health education in California’s public schools to be medically accurate, age-appropriate, and unbiased.) Through negotiations with the charter schools, we have reached a non-legislative agreement that will require the charter schools to follow standards found in SB 71, which were recently adopted by the Board of Education. As a result, legislation is no longer needed to address this issue.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Per the agreement reached between sex-ed advocates and the charter schools, this bill has been placed on the inactive file at the author’s request
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Ensuring Access to Disaster-Relief Services

AB 2327 (Caballero, D-Salinas)
Would require that state and local employees performing emergency work strive to ensure that all victims receive the assistance they need and for which they are eligible. The bill states that public employees shall provide emergency services without asking for identification documents or information that is not strictly necessary to establish eligibility for those services under state or federal law. During last year’s wildfires in San Diego, evacuees were asked for identification documents to access emergency services. Many people did not have identity documents with them and were denied services.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Signed into law by the governor

Protecting Identity Documents

The ACLU is working to require basic privacy protections for government identity documents that are issued with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips. Without privacy protections, RFID chips are susceptible to unauthorized reading and cloning. These three bills, co-sponsored by the ACLU, were held over from last year:

SB 29 (Simitian, D-Palo Alto)
Would inform parents and obtain their consent before a school issues a child an RFID device for purposes of tracking or attendance-taking.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Vetoed by the governor
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SB 30 (Simitian, D-Palo Alto)
Would set minimum standards and protections for the use of RFID chips in any type of state-issued identity document.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status:Placed on the inactive file pending completion of a study by the California Research Bureau on appropriate privacy protections for the use of RFID chips
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SB 31 (Simitian, D-Palo Alto)
Would impose penalties for skimming, cloning, and other unauthorized accessing of information on the chip.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Signed into law by the governor
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Sending Real ID Back to the Drawing Board

Formerly Assembly Joint Resolution 51 (Nava, D-Santa Barbara)
Called on Congress to repeal the Real ID Act of 2005 -- a law creating a de facto national ID card that concentrates the personal data of all U.S. drivers into one giant DMV database.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: The author rewrote this bill on June 26 and it is now a resolution on a different topic. We have no position on the revised bill.
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Promoting Cell Phone Privacy

AB 3011 (Huffman, D-San Rafael)
Would have amended the Public Utilities Code to extend the privacy protections for residential land line consumers to cell phone users. Would have prohibited telephone companies from disclosing the calling patterns, financial information, and demographic information of consumers to other companies or persons without first receiving the written consent of the consumer.
ACLU-NC Position: Support
Status: Failed on Assembly Floor

Pressing to Restore Public Oversight of Police Agencies

SB 1019 (Romero, D-Los Angeles)
Originally sought to overturn the 2006 California Supreme Court decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court, which effectively shut off public access to information about police misconduct. The measure, a major focus of the ACLU-NC in 2007, stalled in the Assembly Public Safety Committee last year and had been significantly narrowed this year to apply only to cities subject to federal consent decrees for police misconduct. When the bill was amended, the ACLU-NC changed its position from support to neutral because the narrowed legislation did not provide substantial relief in our region. Secrecy around police misconduct results in greater mistrust of the police, poor police-community relations, and less responsive and accountable police agencies. 
ACLU-NC Position: Neutral
Status: Passed Senate; failed in Assembly Public Safety Committee
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