The California State Assembly passed a law designed to address the pervasive problem of school bullying by providing California schools with tools to create a safe school environment for all students. The bill is named in memory of Seth Walsh, a 13 year-old gay student from Tehachapi, California, who took his life in September 2010, after facing years of relentless anti-gay harassment at school.

A judicial decision handed down today effectively ends the San Francisco Housing Authority's use of city-wide nuisance injunctions and dismisses all pending criminal cases against alleged violators. The injunctions are unconstitutional, vague, and overly restrictive to the point of infringing on an individual's ability "to exist in San Francisco," wrote the judge in his eight-page decision.

The Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released records today which show that Arizona, Nebraska, and other states broke the Federal Controlled Substances Act when they imported sodium thiopental, a dangerous controlled substance commonly used in executions that is no longer available in the U.S. The DEA released all import declarations filed for sodium thiopental from January 1, 2010, to the present. Only one matches a known purchase made by prison officials – the purchase by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations in October of 2010. Seven other states are known to have directly imported the drug from Dream Pharma in the UK or Kayem Pharmaceuticals in India see map). None of the declarations provided by the DEA match these seven shipments, meaning state officials must have broken federal law in importing the drugs. The records are available here.

The ACLU contacted a school district in northern California today because its Internet filtering software had been improperly configured to block access to web content geared toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. The organization has sent demand letters to school districts across the country as part of the organization's national "Don't Filter Me" initiative, which seeks to combat illegal censorship of educational information on public school computer systems.

New records handed over by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to the ACLU of Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Guardian reveal that state prison officials across the country may have broken the law when importing sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in lethal injections which has been in scarce supply since 2009.

The office of Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley has failed to disclose public documents on the costs of prosecuting capital cases, according to a lawsuit filed today by the ACLU of California on behalf of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. The lawsuit is for public records on expenses related to homicide cases, and discretionary spending generally, by the D.A. of California's most populous – and murderous – county.