News

Last night, the Manteca Unified School District voted to update the dress code as part of a settlement with the ACLU of Northern California, which sued two Sierra High School officials on behalf of a lesbian student in October 2015. Eleventh-grader Taylor Victor was singled out, chastised, and censored after wearing a shirt to school identifying herself as a proud member of the LGBT community. Read More

Legal and scientific experts are warning that California’s proposed lethal injection protocols were created without the transparency and public participation required by law and that these untested execution procedures will amount to human experimentation, with a grave risk that something will go terribly wrong. Read More

The ACLU of California today released a report that finds county jails are putting people’s health at risk by denying, delaying, and ignoring crucial reproductive health care. Read More

The following can be attributed to Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, Director of Criminal Justice and Drug Policy for the ACLU of California:The governor’s proposed state budget released today includes the current Department of Finance estimate of savings resulting from Proposition 47. This first estimate puts FY 2015-16 savings at just $29.3 million, far below all previous estimates and despite a clearly ... Read More

The ACLU and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP have filed a lawsuit challenging Dignity Health’s use of religious directives to deny basic reproductive health care to its patients. Read More

Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Adriene Ludd. Months later, the Sheriff refuses to release the incident report and the dash-cam footage. Read More

A coalition of California civil rights and LGBT organizations said today that supporters of a proposed anti-transgender ballot initiative announced that they have failed to submit the signatures necessary to qualify it for the November 2016 ballot. Read More

The ACLU of Northern California joins San Francisco community members in demanding justice for 26-year old Mario Woods. Woods died Wednesday after police shot him multiple times in San Francisco’s Bayview district. Read More

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today announced that the U.S. armed forces will open all combat jobs, units, and schools to qualified women beginning next year, making no exceptions for any branch of the armed services. Read More

The ACLU today sent a letter demanding that Dignity Health, doing business as Mercy Medical Center Redding, a Catholic-affiliated hospital in California’s largest hospital network, stop unlawfully denying post-partum tubal ligation to patients based on religious doctrine. Read More

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the district court’s preliminary injunction in Texas, et al. v. U.S., enjoining President Obama’s immigration executive action initiatives. Read More

The ACLU of California today released a report that finds both successes and challenges in Prop 47’s first year. The report includes 40 county snapshots with information on public safety spending, incarceration and crime trends, and a decline of people sentenced for low-level felonies. Read More