News & Commentary

Congress just got yet another reminder that the First Amendment right to political boycotts is alive and well in the United States, and any legislative attempt to infringe on that right puts them squarely against the Constitution. Last week a federal district court in Texas 

At 3 a.m., inside her solitary jail cell in Broward County, Florida, Tammy Jackson began having contractions. It took hours for corrections officers to reach a doctor, who said he’d check on Jackson when he came into work later that morning. By the time he arrived at 10 a.m., Jackson had delivered the baby alone in her jail cell. Not only was Jackson incarcerated and isolated without medical care while giving birth, she

On the 50th anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, one of the darkest stains in our nation’s civil rights history, President Obama spoke with hope and confidence about Americans who were “unencumbered by what is, because you're ready to seize what ought to be.” Lenora Lapidus lived her life by this principle. Public servants come in many forms. They’re elected officials, politicians, activists, lawyers, organizers,

On April 11, Hamilton County police in Cincinnati, Ohio arrested Ashley Foster in a Target parking lot on charges of trafficking heroin. Foster was with her two young sons, one of whom was only eight weeks old. Foster was taken into a police car, sobbing, while her baby screamed. But because the warrant for her arrest was based in nearby Brown County, Foster sat in jail for five days waiting to be transferred and was kept in the dark about what was happening to her and even of what she was accused. The consequences of her being held pretrial without explanation were tectonic: Her kids were taken by the county department of jobs and family services, and she lost her job. And it was all because of a mistake. It wasn’t until after Foster spent five days in a cage that officials realized th

Last week, President Trump issued a memorandum outlining his latest wishlist of ways to undermine the integrity of our nation’s asylum system. Among them was a direction to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to change how it conducts credible fear interviews, the threshold screening interview given to thousands of asylum seekers every year. DHS is reportedly now planning to deploy Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers – enforcement agents whose mission is to “secure the border” – to conduct credible fear interviews with asylum seekers instead of using professional asylum officers from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). By replacing neutral asylum officers with law enforcement officers, this proposal is a blatant effort to rig the system against asylum seekers and drive down the number of people who pass their screening interviews. In 1996, Congress established a process called “expedited removal” through which immigration officers can summari

William Thorpe has spent nearly 24 straight years in solitary confinement in Virginia prisons stuck in a cell about half of the size of a parking space for more than 22 hours a day, every day, with no outside light and almost no human contact. In his nearly two and a half decades in solitary, Thorpe has seen changes in leadership at the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) and attempts

What do Michael Bloomberg and Oliver North have in common? How about Michelle Malkin and Kim Kardashian West, or Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders? They may not share much turf when it comes to their political or social views, but they do all agree on one point that may surprise you. They all oppose the death penalty. Support for repeal

On Tuesday, April 30, a Minnesota jury convicted police officer Mohamed Noor of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for shooting and killing Justine Damond, a white Australian woman. Damond had called 9-1-1 to report a possible sexual assault near her apartment and then approached Noor’s squad car when he and his partner responded to the call. Noor killed Damond, and he deserved to be found guilty. His decision to shoot and kill an unarmed person without warning, apparently because her presence next to his squad car surprised him, is indefensible. But if the races of Noor and Damond had been reversed, Noor might well have gotten away with murder. The racial aspect of this case speaks volumes about criminal justice and criminal injustice in America today. Noor, who is Black, Muslim, and a So

“Do you want the Boston marathon bomber to vote?” is a provocative question that acts as a smokescreen concealing the real issue — why and when did America decide that people convicted of a crime should not vote?The historical context for this comes from old English common law which justified the concept of “civil death” as punishment for conviction of treason or a felony because a person committing a crime had “corrupt blood,” making the person “dead in the law.” America did not immediately adopt this position because the Constitution was silent on voting rights — it neither granted nor denied anyone the right to vote. Before the Civil War, as a Brennan Center