News & Commentary

When Benjamin Hodge, who is serving a nine-month sentence at the Criminal Justice Complex on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, told a corrections officer he had found a cockroach in his food, he did not expect that officer would choke him to near unconsciousness. Though the jail’s own chief investigator found that the officer, Jamal C

The Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle our asylum system just suffered another major setback. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., permanently blocked a June 2018 “ex

Ten years ago, Illinois enacted a law that imposes important protections against companies collecting and storing our biometric information — including using facial recognition— without our knowledge and consent. The law is called the Biometric Information Privacy Act. Although facial recognition was relatively crude when it was passed, the wisdom of Illinois’ decision has been borne out over the last decade, as facial recognition and other biometric collection has developed and spread. On Monday, the ACLU filed a

Should it be a crime to call public officials corrupt? Yes, according to the police in Exeter, New Hampshire. Earlier this year, they arrested a local man for writing a comment on a news website accusing Police Chief William Shupe of covering for a corrupt officer. Robert Frese was accused of violating New Hampshire’s

This piece was originally published in The New York Times. When the Supreme Court declined on Mond

E.J. Bradford. Chikesia Clemons. Ulysses Wilkerson. Sureshbhai Patel. Greg Gunn. These are only a few of the names of those who have been in headlines after being brutalized or killed at the hands of law enforcement in the

The First Amendment right to record the police is a critical check and balance for people living in a free, open, and democratic society. It promotes the free discussion of governmental affairs as well as protects the democratic process. And for some communities, it’s a vital tool for uncovering, if not deterring, police misconduct. But Boston-based civil rights activists Eric Martin and René Pérez were afraid to record the police. Under a state wiretap law passed

The ACLU is in a federal appeals court on Thursday, challenging a slate of Arkansas laws intended to prevent women from being able to get abortions. One of the four laws we are challenging is a ban on the dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure, a safe and effective abortion method. If enforced, the ban would prevent women from being able to obtain an abortion at all. Arkansas’ ban is part of an anti-abortion campaign being orchestrated by

Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year. While the details are sketchy, the application describes a system