Archive

A U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of California has ruled that the City of Fresno’s practice of immediately seizing and destroying the personal possessions of homeless residents violates the constitutional right of every person to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Read More

SAN FRANCISCO – A new process that allows people who have been placed on a gang injunction enforcement list to petition to have themselves removed by showing that they are no longer active gang members is a positive step, say ACLU of Northern California and LCCR attorneys, who today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the San Francisco City Attorney.    The agreement... Read More

In a new YouTube video released Feb. 28, 2008, Aundre Herron talks about why California’s death penalty has to go.  As both a former prosecutor and murder victim survivor, Herron has a unique and incisive perspective on the death penalty, which she shared with the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice.Watch her testimonyHerron commented that she empathizes with the ... Read More

We are deeply saddened by the apparent murder of 26-year-old Arthur Carmona on Feb. 17, 2008.Arthur was just 16-years-old when he was wrongfully convicted of a robbery as a result of mistaken eyewitness identification in 1998. Arthur spent two years in prison before his innocence was proven, largely as a result of the tireless efforts of his mother, Ronnie Carmona, and his pro-bono legal team... Read More

In a letter addressed to the Board of Supervisors, the Public Defender’s Office, the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR) requested today that the City enact a policy to ensure that all persons named in San Francisco gang injunctions are given the opportunity to be removed from the injunctions when appropriate. Read More

By vetoing three bills that would have helped end wrongful convictions in California, the Governor made it more likely that innocent people will be convicted of crimes they did not commit and the guilty will go free. The ACLU of Northern California regrets the Governor’s decision. Read More

This report explains in detail the joint assessment the ACLU of California on government-funded video surveillance cameras and the current state of video surveillance in California. Read More

The Assembly Public Safety Committee refused to vote on SB 1019 on June 26, 2007, dealing a serious blow to efforts to restore police accountability in California. Earlier this month, SB 1019 (D-Romero) was passed in the state Senate in a 22-11 vote, despite threats by police associations of torpedoing unrelated term limit reform if the bill was passed. Read More

The City of Fairfield and ten families adopted a settlement agreement yesterday providing for comprehensive new policies to address police conduct on school campuses. This agreement resolved a March 2, 2007 incident when the Fairfield police came onto the campus of Rodriguez High School and rounded-up a group of innocent students, accusing them of being gang members. Read More

Sacramento – The state Senate today voted to restore public access to records and public hearings related to complaints about police misconduct.In a 22 to 11 vote, the Senate approved SB 1019, overturning the state Supreme Court’s Aug. 29, 2006 decision in Copley Press v. San Diego, which blocked public access to records about police complaints and effectively stopped police commissions from... Read More