News & Commentary

This year marks 400 years since enslaved, kidnapped people were purchased by the forefathers and – mothers of America. Are the events that began 400 years ago connected to today? William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

On Tuesday, a federal court issued a decision in our challenge to Alabama’s near-total ban on abortion blocking the law from taking effect. The decision comes on the heels of similar rulings blocking abortion bans in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah. In other words, the ACLU has an undefeated, 7-0 record challenging state abortion bans in court. None of the state abortion bans passed earlier this year will be permitted to take effect. Abortion is – and will remain – legal in all 50 states.

Many of us wear masks on Halloween for fun. But what about a world in which we have to wear a mask every single day to protect our privacy from the government’s oppressive eye?

This weekend, presidential hopefuls and our current president will flex their criminal justice reform muscle at the Second Step Presidential Justice Forum in South Carolina. Unlike past campaigns, where candidates tried to outdo each other with “tough on crime” agendas, presidential hopefuls now tout their “smart on crime” policies. Candidates vie for who has the most innovative plan for fixing the criminal justice system, with many committing to our Rights for All policy that aims to reduce incarcerations rates by 50 percent.

In 1994, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office committed gross prosecutorial misconduct in order to convict Lamar Johnson of murder. They knowingly presented perjured testimony, fabricated facts to negate Johnson’s strongly corroborated alibi, and buried the fact that a prime witness against him was a paid jailhouse informant. Twenty-five years later, that same Circuit Attorney’s Office, now led by Kim Gardner, is doing everything it can to get Johnson a new trial so the truth can vindicate him. But the Missouri establishment is fighting her tooth and nail, all while Johnson languishes in prison for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.   The only reason Johnson has a fighting shot at liberty today is that Gardner, like a handful of recently elected, reform-minded prosecutors, created a Conviction Integrity Unit to review questionable cases like his. Gardner’s CIU produced a 70-page report cataloging the misconduct in Johnson’s case and used it to move for a new trial. It should have been a no-brainer, but a Missouri judge rejected the request — not based on the evidence itself, but because Johnson had technically missed the deadline for filing a new trial motion.   The trial court got it wrong, and today the ACLU, ACLU of Missouri, and the Innocence Project filed an amicus brief explaining why. It’s simple — Missouri courts, like all state and federal courts — have the inherent authority to prevent miscarriages of justice like this. Specifically, no potentially innocent man should be held behind bars and refused a retrial because of a technicality, without so much as a hearing to test the evidence and expose the state’s wrongdoing. The trial court could have actively avoided this black letter law in denying the motion.   Given the clarity of the legal question here, we have to ask ourselves why the Missouri courts — as well as the state Attorney General, who opposed the new trial motion and would represent the state in further proceedings — are bending over backward to avoid learning the truth. After all, the justice system in Missouri has always supported a prosecutor’s discretion to follow the evidence where it leads, just as Gardner and her CIU have done here. Is the difference that Gardner dared to use that discretion to vindicate a man, rather than keep him locked up? Is it that Johnson is Black? Is it that Gardner is a young, Black, female elected prosecutor who has upset St. Louis’ good old boys club, including investigating the notorious St. Louis police? Or is it that punishment and racism are so deeply ingrained in our criminal justice system that any indication that we get it wrong from time to time — even if getting it wrong means stealing a man’s life — must be fought to the hilt, lest the entire house of cards comes crashing down?   These are all fair questions to ask because Lamar Johnson’s story is hardly unique, nor is the institutional pushback against Kim Gardner’s attempts at reform. Nationwide, a new wave of prosecutors who dare to challenge mass incarceration have been met with resistance at every turn, even when deploying the same discretion that previous prosecutors have enjoyed.

South Dakota’s governor and attorney general today backed down from their unconstitutional attempts to silence pipeline protestors. In response to a lawsuit we filed alongside the ACLU of South Dakota and the Robins Kaplan law firm, the state has agreed to never enforce the unconstitutional provisions of several state laws that threatened activists who encourage or organize protests, particularly protests of the Keystone XL pipeline, with fines and criminal penalties of up to 25 years in prison.

Two weeks ago, I traveled to northern Mexico along with Mexican photographer Guillermo Arias to meet with asylum-seekers who’ve been trapped at the southern U.S. border by Trump Administration policies. Neither of us was prepared for what we saw there.

Anahi Jaquez –Estrada is scared. As soon as Monday, she may be deported to a country she hardly knows: away from her 8-year-old daughter and her husband, both of whom are United States citizens. She has lived in the U.S. almost her entire life and is in the process of becoming a lawful permanent resident. Her story is at once exceptionally tragic and a paradigmatic example of how our immigration legal system is failing — and tearing families apart.

The United States locks up more of its people than any other nation in the world. A whopping 2.2 million people are living behind bars in this country on any given day. Our national incarceration rate is four times that of Australia, five times that of the United Kingdom, and six times that of Canada.