Stories from the ACLU of Washington

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Published: 
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Questioning Executions: On Crosscut.com: As our state’s first execution in many years approaches, Hubert Locke, dean emeritus of UW’s Evans School of Public Affairs, questions the wisdom of a punishment that cannot be revoked when mistakes are uncovered. Inequality and Prisons: Columnist Jerry Large of the Seattle Times highlights a recent paper by a UW sociologist that explores the negative consequences flowing from our policies of locking up more and more people.
Published: 
Monday, August 23, 2010
Ending the War on Drugs means ending our over-reliance on the criminal justice system to address what is primarily a public health problem. It means replacing arrest, prosecution, and incarceration with prevention, education, and treatment as your primary strategies for reducing substance abuse and improving the health and safety of our communities. And it means ending the civil liberties, civil rights, and racial justice abuses that have flowed with terrible inevitability from our declaration of war not truly on inanimate substances, but rather on people - disproportionately people of color, young people, and poor people. But there is reason for hope that the War on Drugs is coming to an end. And Washington is a leader in making it happen. To support this claim, I offer Exhibit A. Read more
Published: 
Friday, August 20, 2010
The ACLU works to protect student rights in the courts and in the state legislature. But our most valuable job is educating students and families about rights they may not even realize they have.
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Thursday, August 19, 2010
Another lawsuit against the Seattle police: The Stranger looks at the latest lawsuit over excessive force against a jaywalker by Seattle police officers. It reminds readers of the ACLU-WA’s observation that such incidents point to the need for training in how to de-escalate situations, especially when there is no threat whatsoever to public safety. NSA Snooping: The Seattle Weekly reports that our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (aka EFF) are again pursuing a lawsuit over an NSA spy program created during the Bush era. In an earlier EFF suit that was dismissed a former AT&T technician  claimed that in cities across the county—Seattle included—the NSA was operating "secure rooms" where the agency was allegedly conducting surveillance on customers' online activities.
Published: 
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Inaugurating our periodic feature of civil liberties items in the media: Spokane’s Spokesman-Review reports on a new study by Gonzaga University on dropout prevention for middle schoolers. Included are many practical alternatives for people concerned about the “school-to-prison pipeline” – i.e., the reliance on “zero tolerance” discipline and other harsh measures that result in students being pushed out of school and ending up in the criminal justice system. An article in The Stranger calls into question the Seattle Police Department’s many arrests of individuals simply for possessing marijuana when this is supposed to be – by the voter-passed Initiative 75 – the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. Included is this nugget from Alison Holcomb, the ACLU-WA’s drug policy director: "Even if police are stumbling across marijuana secondarily, it's still a waste of their time to process the paperwork for the marijuana offense. It's a waste of tax dollars to submit that marijuana for testing."  And finally, a point of pride: Our recent blog post on the Witt Standard in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” cases is now featured on the national ACLU’s “Blog of Rights,” Daily Kos, and Pam’s House Blend.
Published: 
Monday, August 16, 2010
Although the number of people being arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes in Washington is decreasing, we still rely far too heavily on the criminal sanction for dealing with drug abuse. Only 140 people were in Washington prisons for drug crimes in 1980, while in 2008 there were over 2,300. And this doesn’t include people locked up in jails; for example, in 2008, the average daily population (ADP) of drug offenders in the King County jail was 459 – 18% of total ADP. Similarly, less than 6,000 people were arrested for drug crimes in 1981, while the figure was over 20,000 in 2009 (down from an all time high of 27,909 in 2007). Even after adjusting for population changes, these increases are staggering.
Published: 
Friday, August 13, 2010
Last week, Air Force Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach filed a high-profile lawsuit arguing that the Air Force should be forced to meet the "Witt standard" if it attempts to discharge him from military service under Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT). The "Witt standard" comes from a significant 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in an ACLU of Washington case, Witt v. U.S. Air Force, in which the court ruled that the Air Force must prove that dismissing a specific servicemember under DADT is necessary to ensure “good order, morale, and discipline” within the unit he or she served, rather than simply proving in a more general way that DADT broadly advances military readiness. With that requirement of proof, the “Witt standard” was born. Read more
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Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Last week the Seattle P-I publicized the fact that Seattle's University District needle exchange, privately funded and operated by the People's Harm Reduction Alliance, had added clean crack pipes to its arsenal of disease-prevention weapons.  KING 5 News picked up the story, as did KIRO Radio. Many of the reader comments posted to the stories reflect the expected divide in public opinion about needle exchange programs.  On the one hand are those who understand that certain strategies focused on reducing the societal and personal harms of drug abuse not only "meet addicts where they are" and provide a compassionate link to treatment and recovery, they also save tax dollars that would otherwise be spent on emergency rooms, hospitalization, and uninsured treatment of Hepatitis C, HIV, and AIDS.  On the other are those who think harm reduction strategies simply enable addiction, and addicts would be better served by a dose of "tough love" - or simply left to die from overdose or the diseases they contract. Read more
Published: 
Friday, August 6, 2010
A Washington State woman was featured in a recent newspaper article that triggered government investigations into pregnancy discrimination in mortgage lending. Federal law prohibits mortgage lenders from discriminating against borrowers based on pregnancy, as long as the borrowers can demonstrate that they intend to return to work and will be able to continue meeting the income requirements for the loan. And, although lenders may ask about borrowers’ incomes to determine loan eligibility, they may not use pregnancy or maternity leave as grounds to deny mortgages. Read more
Published: 
Monday, August 2, 2010
Washington, D.C. is not generally known for progressive drug policy reform, but last week it was host to the advancement of three laws that may help dismantle the failed War on Drugs. The Fair Sentencing Act is on its way to Obama's desk, medical marijuana will soon be available in D.C., and the Webb Commission is one step closer to being convened. Read more
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Friday, July 30, 2010
This week the ACLU and Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a joint report on people with mental disabilities in the US immigration system. Highlighting another tragic failing of our nation’s system for dealing with immigration, the report found that “people with mental disabilities, including US citizens and others with claims to remain in the US, receive unfair hearings and are at risk of erroneous deportation in the absence of courtroom safeguards.” Read more
Published: 
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Under federal Title IX and state law, girls and boys in Washington state are supposed to have equal opportunities to participate in high school sports All too often, however, boys’ opportunities far exceed girls’ because schools offer more boys sports, more squads within a sport, or bigger team rosters. Read more

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