ACLU ONLINE NEWSLETTER 23JUL10

Why Arizona's "Show Me Your Papers" Law Must Be Stopped Our Secret Security Establishment: The Big Picture On The Cusp of History Victory for Constance McMillen! Brooklyn Women Knew Their Rights—and You Should, Too! Ask President Obama WHY His Administration is Restricting Coverage for Vulnerable Women Victory! Religious Rights of American Indian Kindergartner Upheld Brooklyn Women Knew Their Rights—and You Should, Too! Thanks to the ACLU, Taneisha Chapman and Markeena Williams knew their rights when New York Police Department (NYPD) officers stopped them earlier this summer outside a housing project in New York City. After the officers demanded their identification, the women produced a flyer issued by a local state legislator containing the ACLU's advice on what to do when stopped by police. The flyer included the fact that in New York, "You can't be arrested for merely refusing to identify yourself on the street.” The officers went ahead and arrested Chapmen and Williams anyway. The unspecified charges were later dismissed. Now, the Brooklyn women are suing the city for wrongful arrest. Each day in New York City, thousands of innocent people—mostly black and Latino—are stopped by police on the city's streets. The ACLU is committed to providing people the information necessary to protect their rights during police encounters. The ACLU offers this know-your-rights card which walks you through what to do if you're stopped by the police. The know-your-rights card not only apprises people of their rights, it helps them defend those rights. For instance, it informs people how to proceed if their rights are violated. A word to the wise: learn the laws in your state. In New York, police can't make you identify yourself if they don't reasonably suspect you of a crime, but that is not the case in some other places. >> Check out the ACLU's national know-your-rights card. >> View the card on your mobile device. >> Contact your local ACLU with state-specific questions. back to top Ask President Obama WHY His Administration is Restricting Coverage for Vulnerable Women Tens of thousands of ACLU supporters have already acted to protest the Obama administration's decision to severely restrict abortion coverage for vulnerable women. We have to keep flooding the White House with more messages. If you haven't signed our petition, now is the time. Unless we act, women in the newly-created, high-risk insurance pools will be shut off from abortion coverage even if they want to pay for it with their own money. This broad and highly restrictive abortion ban goes far beyond what the law requires. It forbids states from choosing to cover abortion. And it zeroes in on vulnerable women—those with pre-existing conditions who have been denied health care coverage on the individual market. >> Take action! Ask President Obama WHY his administration is restricting coverage for vulnerable women. back to top Victory! Religious Rights of American Indian Kindergartner Upheld The ACLU won an important victory earlier this month for a five-year-old American Indian kindergarten student who wears his hair in traditional braids as a form of expressing his family's religious beliefs. School officials had initially placed the student on in-school suspension for violating the school district's dress code requiring boys to have short hair. A federal appeals court ruled that the Needville Independent School District (NISD) violated Texas state law by punishing the student. "This is an important victory for all Texas schoolchildren, whatever their religion," said Lisa Graybill, Legal Director for the ACLU of Texas. "Under Texas' Religious Freedom Restoration Act, schools must accommodate student religious beliefs in their dress codes—and that applies as equally to Catholic students' right to wear a rosary or Jewish students' right to wear a yarmulke as it does to our American Indian client's right to wear his braids." back to top Do you know somebody who would be interested in getting news about the ACLU and what we're doing to protect civil liberties? Help us spread the word about ACLU Online — forward this newsletter to a friend.

July 23, 2010 Why Arizona's "Show Me Your Papers" Law Must Be Stopped The ACLU appeared in federal court yesterday arguing that the discriminatory Arizona racial profiling law, scheduled to go into effect July 29, be blocked while it is litigated. The extreme law requires local law enforcement to demand "papers" from anyone they stop who they suspect isn't authorized to be in the country. Shortly after the law was passed in May, the ACLU brought a legal challenge to it with several other civil rights organizations. One of the plaintiffs in our challenge is Jim Shee—an American-born, 70-year-old U.S. citizen of Spanish and Chinese descent who has already been stopped twice by local law enforcement officers in Arizona and asked to produce his "papers." If the Arizona police are already engaging in racial profiling, this extreme law will lead to even more police harassment of citizens based solely on the fact that they may look or sound foreign. How else would police form a suspicion that someone was not in the U.S. legally? The law has been condemned by high ranking law enforcement officials, including the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, who know first hand that the law will destroy the public trust necessary for police to do their jobs. People who are afraid that they will be questioned and forced to show papers because of the way they look will be much less likely to report crimes or serve as witnesses. Similarly, already-stretched police officers will have to spend their time investigating whether someone is here legally rather than solving violent and other very serious crimes. Arizona should not become a police state where people are subject to racial profiling and live under constant threat of police harassment. Would you ask this man for his papers? Why? Because of the color of his skin? Because of the language he's speaking? Because he's doing yard work? The fact is, there is no way to tell who is documented and who is not. If SB 1070, Arizona's racial profiling law, is allowed to go into effect, American citizens will be subjected to racial profiling. People in this country will be legally stopped, interrogated and harassed simply because of what they look like or the language they are speaking. That's not right, and it's not constitutional. Please watch this video, and then, pass it on to your friends. back to top Our Secret Security Establishment: The Big Picture This week, The Washington Post issued a major investigative report on what it calls "Top Secret America"—a geographically sprawling network of secret government agencies with a budget of $75 billion. The ACLU has regularly warned about the dangers of our gigantic national security establishment—calling for increased oversight and fixes for runaway government secrecy—both in our report on the emerging public-private "Surveillance-Industrial Complex" and in many other places. The Post paints a stark portrait of hundreds of government agencies drowning in data, with government systems vacuuming up vast quantities of information about our daily activities, in the unlikely hope of discovering useful information. >> Learn more about "Top Secret America." Visit The Washington Post website to read the full article. >> Read more about the ACLU's work to expose excessive government spying. back to top On The Cusp of History By Laura W. Murphy, Director, Washington Legislative Office Anyone who works on reforming the criminal justice system can attest to the fact that such efforts often take years of commitment and dedication before bearing fruit. We are currently at just such a moment, as Congress is one final step away from passing major reform of one of the most deeply flawed aspects of a broken and dysfunctional criminal justice system—the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. More than 23 years ago, Congress passed—and President Reagan signed into law—legislation that established the infamous 100-to-1 disparity. Possessing or dealing five grams of crack cocaine—the weight of two pennies—currently results in the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as dealing 500 grams of powder cocaine. Seventeen years ago, the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office convened the first national conference on the crack/powder disparity bringing together scientists, defense attorneys, affected families, criminologists, members of Congress and civil rights groups. It was at that conference where we were finally able to persuade key leaders that this issue was not just a criminal justice reform issue, but it was also a civil rights, civil liberties and human rights crisis that greatly contributed to record-setting rates of incarceration in the United States. In the two decades that followed, the disparity has resulted in gross racial inequality in the African-American community and contributed to disproportionately severe sentences and prison overcrowding because low-level, often first-time, nonviolent drug users were getting hard time instead of drug treatment. This diversion of government resources could have been used for far more effective prevention and treatment programs that would not have destroyed families in the process. In March, the US Senate passed long-overdue legislation to help reform the infamous crack sentencing disparity. The Fair Sentencing Act (S. 1789) would vastly reduce the sentencing disparity to a ratio of 18-to-1, as well as eliminate the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack. It is important to point out that maintaining an 18-to-1 disparity is not at all based on science showing differences between crack and powder cocaine (they are literally different forms of the exact same drug), but it was instead a compromise reached to secure broad-based support from members of both political parties. This painful compromise helped to ensure that senators would not have to cast a politically difficult vote in a highly contentious election year. The ACLU has remained steadfast in our commitment to eliminating the disparity completely. However, now that the Senate has acted to pass a reform bill that falls short of our ideal, we must confront the reality that it will nonetheless make important improvements in the lives of many people who would have otherwise been locked away for years—or decades—on end. The Fair Sentencing Act is currently awaiting a final vote on the House floor before being sent to President Obama for his signature. Never before have advocates for crack cocaine sentencing reform been so close to the finish line—a struggle I have been engaged in since 1993. The House could vote any day now on the Fair Sentencing Act. I am very hopeful that it will successfully pass this final legislative hurdle before bringing some much needed justice to an aspect of our criminal justice system that has been sorely lacking in just that for far too long now. We are indeed on the cusp of history. >> Take action! Please join with the ACLU in urging the House of Representatives to pass this much needed reform of our sentencing laws. It's time to hold the final vote on the Fair Sentencing Act (S. 1789)! back to top Victory for Constance McMillen! Itawamba County School District officials agreed to have a judgment entered against them in the case of Constance McMillen, a recent high school graduate who sued her school for canceling the prom rather than let her attend with her girlfriend. The agreement ends a precedent-setting lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf McMillen, a Fulton, MS resident who suffered humiliation and harassment after parents, students and school officials executed a cruel plan to put on a "decoy" prom for her while the rest of her classmates were at a private prom 30 miles away. School officials agreed to adopt a comprehensive nondiscrimination and non-harassment policy that covers sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, which is the first such policy in any public school in Mississippi. The school also agreed to pay McMillen $35,000 in damages and pay for McMillen's attorneys' fees. "Constance went through a great deal of harassment and humiliation simply for standing up for her rights, and she should be proud of what she has accomplished," said Christine P. Sun, senior counsel with the ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project. "Thanks to her bravery, we now not only have a federal court precedent that can be used to protect the rights of students all over the country to bring the date they want to their proms, but we also have the first school anti-discrimination policy of its kind in Mississippi." back to top Join us on...

American Civil Liberties Union 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, New York 10004-2400 Geraldine Engel and Lisa Sock, Editors

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