News & Commentary

Britney Spears did it again — the pop singer has recently been in the news for her ongoing conservatorship and civil liberties battle with her father, Jamie Spears. This past week, Britney asked a California court to keep her father from being her conservator and having broad control over her life decisions and career. But what exactly is a conservatorship, and what are the implications of it? We sat down with Zoe Brennan-Krohn, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Disability Rights Project, to discuss Britney, conservatorship, and why this is a disability rights issue on our radar.  Q: Can you briefly explain Britney Spears’ situation, and the implications of her conservatorship case? Britney Spears is subject to a court-imposed conservatorship (in most other states this structure is referred to as a guardianship). This means that a court has determined she is unable to provide properly for her food, clothing, or shelter. The court has then granted other people — her conservators — the legal right to make decisions for her. News reports indicate that this has been the case for Britney since 2008. While we do not know the details of Spears’ conservatorship, in general, conservators like those in her case have the ability to make decisions about all aspects of her life — where she lives, where and how she spends her money, what medications she takes, who she spends time with, and other decisions. Q: Can you please break down, what is conservatorship? What does it mean?  Conservatorship means the court is taking away the civil liberties from one person and giving them to someone else. Sometimes it’s ALL of that person’s civil rights and civil liberties, and sometimes it’s partial. But it is the court weighing into the person’s life and saying you, as a person with a disability, are no longer able to make decisions about yourself and livelihood — such as where you live, and how you support and feed yourself — and we are putting someone else in charge of making those decisions. Because it’s such an extreme step to take, it’s really supposed to be a last resort. And once a court has put a person under a conservatorship, only a court can lift that conservatorship.  Q: Why is the ACLU just weighing in on this now? The ACLU has a long history of advocating for the rights of people with disabilities to live independent, self-directed lives as active members of their communities. Our concerns about conservatorship and guardianship are part of that commitment: ensuring that people with disabilities retain their civil rights and liberties and a belief that disabled people are protected through the exercise — rather than the removal — of these rights.  This issue is getting attention right now because of Britney Spears’ fame. But she is only one of untold thousands nationwide under or at risk of guardianship or conservatorship.The ACLU has advocated for expanding supported decision-making, an alternative to conservatorship or guardianship where people with disabilities can choose trusted support people to help them direct their lives, without court intervention or loss of civil rights. Q: Why is conservatorship a disability rights issue?  People only end up under conservatorships or guardianships if a court identifies them as having disabilities. This includes people with psychiatric disabilities, developmental or intellectual disabilities, age-related disabilities like dementia, and other types of disabilities.  Fighting against the unnecessary and dangerous removal of disabled peoples’ civil rights and civil liberties is a core belief of the ACLU’s disability rights work. This is not to say that all conservatorships are bad or wrong or unnecessary — conservatorships are complex and individual processes. But the ease with which disabled people can be stripped of their rights, and the extraordinary difficulties they face getting those rights back, is a systemic disability rights issue about which we have serious concerns.   Q: How do people get into conservatorships? How does conservatorship limit a person’s civil liberties/rights?  Typically a conservatorship happens when somebody comes into court saying they think this person needs guardianship or conservatorship. Often, it can be the parents or relatives of a person with a disability, or sometimes it can happen after a school or doctor tells the parents that they should get a conservatorship. What’s especially dangerous about conservatorships is they are typically viewed as harmless, including by courts and judges who impose them routinely. This is part of society’s paternalism and infantilization of people with disabilities. But in fact, conservatorships are a serious and often permanent arrangement.   Conservatorships limit a person’s civil liberties, which we at the ACLU of course view as a core concern. But beyond that, conservatorships don’t necessarily actually make people safer: They can result in financial, physical, or emotional abuse.  Q: What laws or policies exist that protect someone from a conservatorship of this kind? What would the legal process to lift the conservatorship look like?  Most state laws have some safeguards in place. In California for example, the court is supposed to consider which less restrictive alternatives to conservatorship have been tried before imposing a conservatorship. The judge should ask a person seeking conservatorship, “What else have you tried? Have you tried supported decision-making? Have you tried joint bank accounts or money management classes? Have you tried a system of text reminders to make sure  the person gets to their medical appointments?” And if the person seeking conservatorship hasn’t tried these options, the judge should deny the conservatorship. There should only be a conservatorship if these other options have been tried in good faith and really aren’t working. But in reality, conservatorships are often imposed even when other supports and alternatives might work.   To lift a conservatorship, the laws are different state by state, but a conservatee can go to the court to say they want this changed or lifted, and the court should consider it. However, it’s very difficult. Judges are very reluctant to lift conservatorships, and only the judge has the power to do so. You aren’t necessarily entitled to a lawyer to help you get out of a conservatorship either. And in many cases, it is virtually impossible for a person to access the courts, especially if their conservator doesn’t agree that the conservatorship should be lifted. How would the person — who cannot choose where they live or where they go or who they associate with — figure out how to get before a judge to challenge that they cannot make these decisions? It can be a Catch-22. As a general matter, it’s much easier to get into conservatorships than to get out of them.  Q: We don’t know Britney’s diagnosis or details about her particular situation. How do we know this case is a civil rights/liberties issue? We don’t know if Britney Spears identifies herself as a person with disabilities, or what, if any, diagnoses she has received. But by virtue of being under a conservatorship, we know that the court has determined that she is disabled, and has stripped away her civil rights because of that disability. So it’s inherently a civil rights/civil liberties issue.  What we don’t know is what the info the court had, what Britney has said about what she wants specifically, what other options have been tried, or what her lawyers have said. So while it’s possible that this is an example of a thoughtful conservatorship that was implemented as the last resort and is being reviewed carefully, thoroughly, and regularly, that is not the norm for conservatorships, and it appears inconsistent with what we see of Britney publicly. Our view is that in general, conservatorships should be viewed with skepticism and used as a last resort.  In most cases, it’s done routinely and without substantive engagement.  Q: Are there alternatives to conservatorship that can help keep a person with a disability and others safe, without limiting their rights?  Yes, there are plenty of alternatives to conservatorship, and they are important. Everyone — with and without disabilities — uses supports to make decisions. We ask friends for advice, research issues, and make lists of pros and cons. These same options should be available to people with disabilities. Powers of attorney, advanced medical directives, shared control over finances, and supported decision-making are all options for disabled people to keep their rights and get support in making decisions, just like nondisabled people do.  Q: What would you say to people that think the conservatorship in Britney’s case is for the best? And that the risks of harm (emotional/material/physical) to herself and/or others are too high? We don’t know all of the risks and benefits at play, so we can’t speak to the specifics of her case. But we do know that the conservatorship itself also has risks. The risks in conservatorship can include financial, physical, and emotional abuse. And even when there is no abuse, conservatorships limit a person’s ability to advocate for themselves, learn from their decisions and mistakes, and grow and develop. There is a risk in being told that your opinions, your likes and dislikes, don’t matter — it makes it harder to stand up to abuse or neglect. So in any conservatorship, including this, we would want to know that the real risks (and benefits) of both conservatorship and its alternatives have been seriously weighed.   Q: Do ALL people with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights? Shouldn’t it be on a case by case determination? All people with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights as much as possible. What that looks like will be different for different people — some have significant support needs for some or all of their lives. But as a society we need to find ways to support people with disabilities and recognize that they are individuals with a full range of human experiences and preferences who have the right to exercise their civil liberties. 

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, protestors throughout America march to demand an end to police abuse. Advocates for the compelling movement to divest from the police and reinvest in communities convincingly argue that significant portions of the tax dollars we spend on policing would be better spent supporting the needs of communities of color and on alternatives to policing itself. Continuing to rely on overfunded police departments, which seem all too happy to continue to enforce laws in a racist manner and unwilling to limit aggressive uses of force, does not advance public safety. Consider how the racial disparities in the enforcement of marijuana laws have contributed to the mass incarceration of persons of color, or how the enforcement of trivial criminal infractions – like selling loose cigarettes or driving with a broken tail light – have repeatedly led to the murder of Black people. These practices more than adequately illustrate the devastating scope and impact of America’s policing problem. But even where defund/divest efforts succeed, police departments may be able to undermine some of this movement’s most important objectives. Certain achievements, such as creating non-police infrastructures for mental health crisis responses, will be difficult to circumvent, but when it comes to the over-policing and over-surveillance of communities of color, a foreseeable problem awaits. In response to a loss of funding, police departments are likely to consider shifting from more expensive, racist, human policing to more cost-efficient, racist, technology-driven policing. Should this play out, we will be left an altered but equally dangerous beast to fight. And there is a very real risk of that happening. It is a risk the Movement for Black Lives has focused upon at length, and it is time we all do the same. Surveillance Technologies and Racism Like policing itself, investigations into surveillance technology deployments have revealed, time and again, that they are overwhelmingly unleashed against communities of color. These technologies include:

When voters resoundingly chose Karen McDonald in the August 4 primary to become her party’s nominee for Oakland County prosecutor, the ACLU of Michigan considered it a major win. Not for a particular candidate, but for the policies that can help us end our community’s overreliance on incarceration and eliminate racism within our criminal legal system. Voters are increasingly seeking the kinds of policies at the heart of our Smart Justice Campaign, as illustrated by this race and many others across the country. Oakland County is one of the state’s largest counties. It has Michigan’s second-largest jail population and some of the greatest racial disparities in the criminal legal system statewide. For instance, Black people are six times more likely to be admitted to the Oakland County Jail than white people — even though they only make up about 14 percent of the county’s total population. There is no doubt that the recently ousted prosecutor played a significant role in getting the county into this shameful predicament, and a prosecutor committed to reform can help get us out. The prosecutor’s role is uniquely powerful. No single person has as much control over the fate of individuals caught up in the criminal legal system than the local prosecutor. Elected as their county’s chief law enforcement officer, prosecutors must strive to reflect the views and priorities of their community members, who are increasingly supporting measures to end mass incarceration and demand transparency in decision-making. Michigan is among the many places where this is happening. Earlier this month, a story in the The Intercept took note of the growing momentum behind the movement to elect progressive prosecutors: “On Tuesday night [Aug. 4], the movement realized a major step forward, with reformist prosecutors . . . winning Democratic primaries in counties covering at least 3 million people in four states.” One of the people featured in The Intercept’s story was McDonald, a reform-minded candidate who defeated 12-year incumbent Jessica Cooper in what was described as a huge upset to win her party’s nomination for the Oakland County prosecutor job. Part of what makes the win so heartening is the margin of victory. Voters soundly rejected Cooper. In doing so, they also rejected years of tough on crime policies. For instance, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people sentenced as juveniles to life without parole should be resentenced, and that life sentences should be sought only in “rare and unusual circumstances,” Cooper responded by contending that 90 percent of the children her office had locked up for life should never be released. In other words, in her view, nearly every case represented a “rare and unusual circumstance,” demonstrating an extreme lack of both compassion and common sense. Cooper moreover was notorious for her harsh prosecution of medical marijuana cases, refusal to participate in drug treatment courts, and an overall lack of transparency from her office. McDonald, on the other hand, campaigned on ending cash bail, investing in alternatives to incarceration, and holding police accountable. The primary election outcome was also encouraging in Washtenaw County, MI, where progressive candidate Eli Savit won the Democratic nomination for county prosecutor with more than 50 percent of the vote in the three-way race. “Savit ran on eliminating cash bail, ending coercive plea bargaining, focusing on rehabilitation and reintegration for people who’ve completed criminal sentences, and moving away from a ‘jail-first’ mentality by prioritizing diversion and treating mental health, trauma, and addiction outside of the criminal system,” The Intercept reported. The National ACLU and several of its state affiliates, including Michigan, have been deeply committed to these reforms. As a nonpartisan organization, the ACLU does not support or endorse candidates. Instead, we worked hard to make sure voters knew the policy positions of prosecutorial candidates on a variety of issues related to racism and over-incarceration by launching our “Power of Prosecutors” campaign in June. We then sent a briefing guide to all 114 county prosecutor candidates throughout the state. That guide, “The Power of Prosecutors: A Platform for Smart Justice,” outlines the critical policy reforms we think are needed to end mass incarceration. Moreover, we asked each candidate to submit a survey outlining their positions on combatting racism, police accountability, clearing marijuana convictions for now legal amounts, investing in alternatives to incarceration, and other factors key to overhauling the criminal legal system. We invested greatly in making sure Oakland County voters, in particular, knew the candidates’ positions on key issues. To that end, we spread our message through a television ad that reached more than 98 percent of voters, digital ads that reached more than one million people, direct mail to 80,000 households, nearly 40,000 calls and more than 400,000 texts to voters about the candidates. This work paid off. Along with informing voters about the platforms of candidates in the primary, we significantly built our capacity by recruiting about 1,200 new volunteers, which will allow us to continue this push into the November general election. We will continue educating voters about the importance of prosecuting attorneys, and about candidates’ positions on reform. Most importantly, we will be there reminding voters to make their voice heard — our criminal legal system and democracy depend on it.

As Democrats gather this week to nominate their presidential candidate, they will also adopt the party’s proposed platform. On criminal justice reform, the platform continues to move the party away from its harmful tough-on-crime past. But it also misses an opportunity to respond to Americans’ desire to seek transformational changes in the criminal legal system.   For the past 60 years, presidential politics have played an outsized role in criminal justice policy-setting, despite this issue being largely the domain of states and localities. Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, 90 percent are under state or local jurisdiction.   Barry Goldwater was the first national politician to focus on criminal justice issues as part of a presidential election, invoking tough-on-crime rhetoric and racist attacks on the civil rights movement. The five-term U.S. senator from Arizona was the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and ran on a law-and-order platform that denounced the civil rights movement as lawless and equated it with criminal behavior. He lost the 1964 presidential election, but his candidacy provided a boost for future law-and-order candidates.   In the 1968 elections, Richard Nixon made law-and-order a central theme of his winning campaign, dedicating 17 speeches to the topic. He deployed the “Southern strategy” to appeal directly to Southern white working-class voters who opposed racial desegregation and the advances being made by the civil rights movement.   It was during the Reagan administration that the full development of the law-and-order strategy began to take hold. While Nixon called for a war on drugs in 1971, President Ronald Reagan brought Frankenstein to life — dramatically increasing law enforcement budgets and slashing funding for drug treatment, prevention, and education.   By the early 1990s, Democratic politicians wanted to wrest control of criminal justice issues and began a bidding war with Republicans on who could impose harsher penalties. In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime. Weeks before the New Hampshire primary, he flew home to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, who was mentally incapacitated. During Clinton’s tenure, he slashed funding for public housing by 61 percent while boosting corrections funding by 171 percent, made it easier for public housing to exclude anyone with a criminal history, and signed into law the infamous 1994 Crime Bill.   By 1996, the Democratic Party platform invoked law-and-order rhetoric that differed little from what Republicans expressed two decades earlier:

When the 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, finally allowed women to vote, ACLU founder Crystal Eastman, an ardent suffragist, was not interested in a victory celebration. She wanted women to use their newly minted political power to promote true freedom and equality, regardless of sex. “Now We Can Begin,” she urged, in a still-renowned speech.  But the adoption of the 19th Amendment did not actually enable all women to vote. Black women and other women of color still had to confront laws and practices designed to keep them from voting —despite the fact that the 15th Amendment, in 1870, had already prohibited the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. And today, 150 years after the 15th Amendment’s declaration of equal rights, racist voter suppression is still rampant. It’s wonderful to celebrate the 19th Amendment’s centennial, but it’s not enough. We need to finish the job of the voting rights activists who fought for both the 15th and 19th Amendments. Let People Vote The Constitution says clearly that women and people of color have a legal right to vote. But theory is not practice.  For many decades, the ACLU has been battling laws that outright disenfranchise some people — like people who are incarcerated and people with certain criminal convictions — or create insurmountable barriers for others, especially Black and Brown women and men, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. We’re

Abortion is legal in Texas and across the United States, but that doesn’t stop anti-abortion politicians from doing whatever they can to interfere with access to reproductive healthcare. Local governments have added fuel to the fire by passing anti-abortion ordinances that confuse residents about their rights and increase the ever-present stigma around seeking abortion care. That’s why, for the first time, reproductive rights, health, and justice groups in our state are joining forces to expand essential health care access for all Texans by creating the Texas Abortion Access Network. Join us for TAAN’s launch on Thursday, August 20 at 6 PM CT, to become a founding member of TAAN and hear about how you can get involved.  In the last year alone, 13 cities in Texas have passed so-called “sanctuary cities for the unborn” ordinances. These ordinances attempt to ban abortion in those cities if Roe v. Wade is overturned, and some even attempt to ban contraception. At one point, many of these ordinances even declared abortion providers and other advocacy groups to be “criminal organizations.” We sued and successfully pushed those cities to remove the most harmful parts of those ordinances — but those laws are just one example of the many ways Texas politicians have attacked reproductive freedom. For years, Texas politicians have piled restriction after restriction on abortion access. From enacting 2013’s House Bill 2, which led to the closure of half of all Texan abortion clinics, to banning abortions during the early COVID-19 pandemic, elected officials in Texas continually work to block essential healthcare. But together, we are fighting back for the right to determine our own lives and destinies. The Texas Abortion Access Network (TAAN) is a new collaboration between the ACLU of Texas, AFIYA Center, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, Progress Texas, Texas Equal Access Fund, Texas Freedom Network, Jane’s Due Process, and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance. We’re building community among Texas residents who are fed up with attacks on their reproductive freedom.  Through TAAN, we are building grassroots power across Texas. We will not only defend against further restrictions but also empower activists to dive into action and put proactive, protective laws on the books in their hometowns. We are building a diverse base of volunteers that represent every corner of the state and equipping them with the tools they need to be leaders in their communities.    A key component of TAAN is the Texas Abortion Access Academy, an 8-week online training program led by abortion access experts. The academy will cover a comprehensive array of topics to build each person’s capacity to become an effective abortion rights advocate. We’re including a crash-course on the status of abortion in Texas, how to talk to others about abortion, background on reproductive justice, and how to advocate and organize for abortion access. At the end of the program, cohort members will have gained the skills to lobby their local government, have difficult conversations about abortion, and get others involved in the movement.  Let’s be clear: Attacks on abortion care won’t stop Texans from needing, and seeking, abortion care. They’ll just ensure that the most vulnerable Texans have a much more difficult and costly experience accessing it. We’ve seen it again and again — restrictions to abortion care disproportionately harm Black and Brown people, people struggling to make ends meet, those who are already parenting, folks in rural areas, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ folks, and young people.   Without access to reproductive health care, our communities can’t thrive. And while abortion remains legal, the fact that the Supreme Court nearly allowed a Louisiana law— one

For weeks, federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security laid siege to the city of Portland to suppress the voices of those demanding justice for Black lives. The militarized agents used sharpshooters to maim people, swept protesters away in unmarked cars, and brutally attacked journalists, legal observers, and medics with sonic weapons and tear gas. They didn’t spare moms, dads, veterans, nurses, or even the city’s mayor.   The agency’s lawlessness was so profound that a federal court in Portland issued a restraining order against the agency after the ACLU filed suit. Congress held numerous hearings. The agency’s inspector general opened an investigation. Even former leaders of the Department of Homeland Security decried its abuses. Richard Clarke, who served on the National Security Council for Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, called for dismantling DHS.    The administration’s effort to use its response to the protests in Portland as some twisted campaign prop miserably backfired, and the agents were forced to retreat. Now, recognizing that he’s in hot water, Chad Wolf, who was illegally appointed as head of DHS, is on a media tour in an attempt to rewrite history. But the truth was caught on video for the world to see. No press interview, no op-ed, and no statement by any administration official can undo the fact that DHS agents beat a Navy veteran for simply asking them questions. They can’t hide the viral video of unmarked federal agents — later identified to be with DHS — hauling a protester off the streets of Portland into an unmarked vehicle. They can’t make us forget the sight of DHS agents firing tear gas at individuals simply exercising their right to protest, or beating and dragging off medics providing aid to an unconscious bystander. They also can’t erase the decades of abuse, civil rights violations, killings, and discriminatory surveillance of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities.   Wolf did get one fact right: “Courthouses uphold everyone’s rights.” The federal court in Portland did uphold the people’s rights when DHS brought its police state tactics there. It ordered the agency to stop arresting and attacking journalists and legal observers. But DHS didn’t comply with the court order — even after the court issued its restraining order, the agency continued to attack journalists and legal observers.   An agency claiming to defend the courthouse should, at a minimum, obey the orders coming out of it.   As we have for a century — much longer than DHS has been around — the ACLU will continue to unapologetically defend the Constitution from all those who undermine it. This includes the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is too powerful, too abusive, and too much of a threat to America’s democratic values. As ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero and former Bush administration official Richard Clarke put it, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Immediately after Trump’s election, we put the president and his administration on notice: If they enacted unconstitutional and illegal policies, we would see them in court. We meant it. As of today, we’ve filed 400 legal actions against this administration. Our 400th filing was a class-action lawsuit that seeks to block the removal of children seeking asylum at the border. 

President Trump’s executive orders threatening to ban TikTok and WeChat, two of the most popular messaging and social media apps in the world, are an unprecedented abuse of emergency powers. No president has ever taken actions like these against platforms that tens of millions of people in the United States use. Selectively banning platforms does little to protect our personal data from abuse — comprehensive surveillance reform and consumer privacy legislation would actually help accomplish that goal. Instead, the bans could cut off the flow of information, art, and communication that social media provides, interfering with communities and connections users in the United States have with each other and with people around the world. This interference with freedom of expression and association violates the First Amendment. Trump’s executive orders are vague and don’t explain the “emergency” purportedly at issue. They also leave important details unclear for 45 days — like the definition of “transactions” to which the bans apply, and how the prohibitions will apply to WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, which has investments in a number of U.S.-based businesses, including Reddit and Riot Games. But here is what we do know: