News

For almost five years, the State of California has engaged in a protracted legal battle over its method of execution: lethal injection. During this time period, executions in California have been on hold. Now, the state is rushing to carry out an execution next week, even though none of the legal questions have been answered. Read More

The ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are calling for answers to critical privacy and safety questions that loom over a controversial federal program to track preschoolers with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips at George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California.In an open letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Servi... Read More

The California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the State of California and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today for allowing school districts throughout the state to charge fees for books and other essential educational supplies. This practice violates the California Constitution which, since 1879, has guaranteed children a free education. Read More

Today Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC), and HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance (HALSA) sent a letter to David Maxwell-Jolly, Director of the California Department of Health Care Services, demanding a full explanation for the unauthorized and illegal disclosures of confidential identifying information of approximately 5,000 HIV-positive Medi-Cal reci... Read More

A federal appeals court today dismissed a case against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc. for its role in the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition program. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Northern California filed the lawsuit in May 2007 on behalf of five men who were kidnapped by the CIA, forcibly disappeared to U.S.-run prisons overseas and tortured. The Bush a... Read More

Today the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the W. Haywood Burns Institute released a report that explores how racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in access to education, employment, and housing impact the contact people will have with the criminal justice system. The report, "Balancing the Scales of Justice," found that these factors relate to how likely it is... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a lawsuit on Aug. 24 against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to speed the release of FBI records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a lawsuit against the FBI to speed the release of records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. Over the past several months, community members from Berkeley, Fresno, Visalia and San Jose, among other cities, have contacted the ACLU to share their experiences abo... Read More

Through an interim policy released to the ACLU of Northern California on August 11, 2010, the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") has weighed in on a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Northern California against the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and the federal immigration agency concerning the County's participation in immigration enforcement. Read More

In a landmark decision on August 4, a federal judge ruled that Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that excluded same-sex couples from marriage in the state, violates the United States Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and Lambda Legal filed two friend-of-the-court briefs in the case supporting the argument that Proposition ... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California will join thirty one other ACLU affiliates around the country today in asking the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make public the details of a new FBI program created to collect and "map" information about racial and ethnic demographics, "behaviors," cultural traditions, and "life style characteristics" in local communities with co... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California will join thirty one other ACLU affiliates around the country today in asking the FBI to make public the details of its new program created to collect and "map" information about racial and ethnic demographics, "behaviors," cultural traditions, and "life style characteristics" in local communities with concentrated ethnic populations. Accor... Read More