Archive

If a lengthy jail sentence kept people from becoming addicted, we wouldn't have any drug problems. But California knows from experience that lengthy jail sentences for possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use just makes things worse – wasted lives, overcrowded jails, and devastating budget deficits. Fortunately, California may be about to turn the corner toward commonsense reform.The... Read More

The California Assembly’s Committee on Public Safety approved a bill Tuesday that would reform California’s drug sentencing laws for simple possession, significantly reduce incarceration costs for counties and help the state end its ongoing incarceration crisis. S.B. 649, the Local Control in Sentencing Act, authored by Sen. Mark Leno, now moves to the full Assembly for consideration, the final hu... Read More

This week, when the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors rejected an enormously expensive proposal to double the size of the county's jail, it made the county a shining example of local government favoring "smart on crime" policies that enhance public safety and reduce incarceration over the dusty old "tough on crime" platitudes of the past.Rather than commit the cash-strapped county to buildin... Read More

As an organizer with the ACLU, I can't help but feel immensely proud to see people participating in civic engagement and advocacy for the very first time. The power of that experience felt particularly real as I read the news of AB 60 passing the California Assembly last week the bill that would make obtaining a driver's license more accessible for all people living and working in California, rega... Read More

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding Maryland's arrestee DNA testing law is a serious blow to genetic privacy. The ruling allows the police to seize the DNA of innocent Americans who have never been convicted of any sort of crime, without a search warrant. And as Justice Scalia makes clear in his scathing dissent, the majority opinion goes against decades of precedent that makes it clear tha... Read More

Yesterday afternoon the California Court of Appeal held that our prison system has, once again, completely failed to comply with state law when it adopted a problematic procedure for carrying out lethal injection executions.Given that there is now no legal protocol for lethal injection executions, no known legal source for the drugs, and that manufacturers worldwide are increasingly reluctant to m... Read More

Today the California Assembly passed AB 154 – the Early Access to Abortion bill – by a vote of 48-24. The bill moves on to the state Senate. Authored by Assembly Majority Leader Toni Atkins, AB 154 would improve abortion access by authorizing nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants to perform early abortions safely within the terms of their licenses. Read More

San Francisco – Today the ACLU sued the FBI in a freedom of the press lawsuit on behalf of two editors at a libertarian online magazine. After learning that their Bay Area-based site, Antiwar.com, was the subject of FBI surveillance, Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo sought the documents the government had compiled on both them and the site. After a year, the FBI has failed to produce any ... Read More

In light of recent revelations that the Department of Justice secretly requested the telephone records of Associated Press (AP) journalists, we started thinking about newer calling services, like Google Voice. We know that some journalists also use these services. Are these records vulnerable too?Google Voice can be handy, allowing people on the move like journalists to send and receive calls or t... Read More

The branches of the armed forces are expected to submit plans to the Department of Defense today describing how they will integrate women into combat positions following the repeal of the ban on women serving in combat units. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the department last year challenging the combat ban on behalf of the Service Women's Action Network and four women who served in Iraq or Afgh... Read More