Archive

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California submitted an amicus brief in The People of the State of California vs. Norteño, urging the Solano County Superior Court to limit the overly broad scope of a gang injunction proposed by the City of Fairfield. The ACLU of Northern California brief expressed concerns with several aspects of the injunction, including the potential for racial profiling an... Read More

In February 2009, a Fresno television newscast aired a video of a police officer repeatedly punching Glen Beaty, a homeless man, as two officers took him into custody. In the video, Beaty does not appear to be struggling, resisting, or doing anything else that could warrant this level of force: he is lying on the ground as one officer holds his arm and the other punches him in the head. His arms a... Read More

We all want to live in safe communities, where we have an equal opportunity to succeed. To effectively build safe and healthy communities, we need to solve more violent crimes—especially murders—and we need to prevent more violence by investing in our children. But we don’t have the resources needed for these vital programs because the death penalty is draining millions of dollars every year from ... Read More

Throughout California, thousands of people are not allowed to vote because they are on parole for such statutory felonies as drug offenses and shoplifting. And while African-Americans constitute less than 7% of California's adult population, in 2006 they were approximately 28% of all those disenfranchised as a result of being in prison or on parole for a felony. The ACLU Foundation of Northern Cal... Read More

"The Hidden Death Tax" is a comprehensive report on the costs of California’s death penalty, analyzing for the first time records of actual costs in California death penalty trials.  The report demonstrates that while California tax payers spend well over $100 million every year on the death penalty, it is unclear just how much money is being spent. At the post-conviction level, California taxp... Read More

"Death by Geography" reviews the death-sentencing practices, public safety records, and spending practices of the 24 most populous California counties. The report reveals that while the vast majority of California counties have largely abandoned execution in favor of simply sentencing people to die in prison, just 10 counties continue to aggressively pursue executions, accounting for nearly 85 pe... Read More

This report is a distillation of a roundtable discussion, which focused on the nature of the problem of school bias and pushout, how vulnerable youth populations intersect with one another, and the need to address these very complex and overlapping issues in a manner that is respectful of all students served by our education system. The report concludes with a discussion of various approaches that... Read More

On September 14, 2009 ACLU Foundation of Northern California and civil rights allies filed a motion to intervene in Associated General Contractors of America v. California Department of Transportation.  The lawsuit, currently pending in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, was brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation and seeks to dismantle Caltrans' Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) p... Read More

The rights of two African-American students were violated when they were expelled from Deer Valley High School following an off-campus incident in which police officers pepper-sprayed the students and forcefully arrested them, a judge ruled in May 2008. The judge overturned the expulsions. Read More

The California corrections department is using underground, non-public guidelines, rather than lawful regulations, to decide whether to transfer California prisoners to other states as far away as Mississippi and Tennessee. This means that inmates and their families do not know how the prisons decide whom to transfer. It also leaves open the possibility that prison officials are using arbitrary an... Read More