Archive

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. Read More

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, t... Read More

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 t... Read More

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. Read More

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 gen... Read More

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 American Civil Liberties Union Foundations of California (ACLU Foundations of California) on behalf of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ) at Harvard Law School. The lawsuit is for publ... Read More

Students have a right to be free from unreasonable searches, and a right to keep their personal information private. This means that school officials rarely, if ever, have a right to search the contents of a student's cell phone or other electronic device.But that's just what happened at the Saint Lawrence Academy in Santa Clara. A student at the academy was recently suspended and placed on discip... Read More

By Christopher CalabreseWashington Legislative OfficeToday Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) took an important step toward giving all of us who live our lives online a measure of true digital privacy. He announced (via Twitter — not bad for one of the senior members of the Senate!) that he was filing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2011. It may not roll off the tongue, bu... Read More

Sacramento – In his revised 2011-12 state budget, Governor Brown today recommitted to his criminal justice realignment plan, but left out safe and simple sentencing reforms that would ensure that the plan is effective and affordable. The governor's plan keeps people convicted of minor felonies at the county level instead of in state prison. Advocates highlighted, however, that a key part of the so... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and The San Francisco Bay Guardian (The Guardian) filed a preliminary injunction motion on April 28, asking the court to order the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to disclose records regarding the worldwide scramble for execution drugs by state prison officials. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and ... Read More