News & Commentary

In 1998, teachers in West Virginia strapped a 4-year-old autistic girl with cerebral palsy to a wooden chair. Why? She was being “uncooperative” because she needed to use the bathroom. The girl suffered bruises and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2003, school officials in Michigan held a 15-year-old autistic boy in a face-down rest

Three years ago on New Year’s Eve, Dasha Fincher was arrested in Monroe County, Georgia, after the deputies performed an on-the-spot test of a bag of blue substance that they found in the car in which she was a passenger. The suspicious stuff in the bag came up positive for methamphetamines. After her arrest, the judge in her case set bail at $1 million because she was perceived as a drug trafficker. There was just one problem. The roadside drug-test was wrong. The blue substance wasn’t meth — it was cotton candy. Fi

In Alabama, a family is still grieving after local police killed their son on Thanksgiving night after a gunman opened fire at a mall. But several months after the incident, the Alabama attorney general is still keeping the Bradfords, and the region’s Black community, in the dark about critical details of what happened that night. The Bradfords and the community still don’t know the identity of the Hoover Police Department officer who fired the fatal shots and the state attorney general refusing to release the evidence he relied on to decide the officer won’t face charges for taking the life of an innocent man. Hoover Police Shoot, Then Criminalize EJ Bradford On Thursday, Nov. 22, 2018, Emantic “E.J.” Bradford Jr

Billy Wayne Coble was convicted of a Texas triple homicide in 1989. On Thursday, he is scheduled for execution.A former ACLU client, Coble’s story was not a happy one before he found himself on death row. He was a Vietnam veteran who had been raised by a mother who was institutionalized for mental illness and by a father debilitated by alcoholism. But if Coble’s execution goes forward, he will be killed not for who he is or for what he’s been convicted of, but because of the testimonies of so-called “experts” whose testimony can be summed up in two words: unreliable junk. Years after Coble was initially sentenced to death in 1990, an appellate court in 2007 threw out that death sentence because the trial judge had erred in

Earlier this year, the Trump administration granted a request from the state of South Carolina for an exception to a federal rule barring discrimination in federally funded child welfare programs. With its action, the administration allowed government-contracted and taxpayer-funded child welfare agencies in South Carolina to turn away would-be foster and adoptive parents because they do not share the agency’s religious beliefs. The justification for this action was the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. When it was passed by Congress and signed i

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a rare unanimous ruling in Timbs v. Indiana, holding for the first time that the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause applies to state and local governments — not just federal authorities.  The fact that this landmark decision is unanimous is itself remarkable. But it bears noting that in separate opinions, both Justice Ruth Bader Ginsb

A number of states recently passed laws that require state contractors — including teachers, lawyers, newspapers and journalists, and even students who want to judge high school debate tournaments — to certify that they are not participating in politically motivated boycotts against Israel. Dozens of states have considered such “anti-BDS” laws, and a bipartisan group of 73 senators recently passed a bill — the Combating BDS Act — that would encourage states to adopt such laws. The ACLU takes no position on boycotts of Israel or any foreign country, but we have long defended the right to boycott, which is

This piece was originally published in The Denver Post. When I was a kid, my mom gave me Barbies, but I preferred to play with G.I. Joes. By high school, I was dressing in my brothers’ clothe

Paper letters have a final resting stop — whomever they are addressed to. From a practical standpoint, and a legal one, that feature of regular mail made understanding and applying privacy protections relatively straightforward. But as our communication technologies have changed, courts have struggled to grant a similar degree of privacy protection to communications in the modern era. Digital communications present new problems. For example, your email does not live in your letterbox but in an onli