Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Will Matthews, ACLU
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Posts by Will Matthews, ACLU
ACLU in NYT: Commutations are Good, Addressing Systemic Injustice is Better
01 month ago
Borrowed from the British monarchy and codified in the United States Constitution after lively debate at the Philadelphia Convention, the power of pardon and commutation was bestowed upon American presidents because of the recognition that injustices can and do occur in our criminal justice system.
An example of those injustices is the unfair and racially biased 18-to-one crack-cocaine sentencing disparity, which was reduced last year from 100-to-one after Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act. The disparity has contributed to hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders, a disproportionate number of whom, like Hamedah Hasan, are people of color, serving indefensibly long sentences behind bars.
As Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, writes for today’s New York Times Room for Debate , “Presidents should surely exercise the power of commutation more often than they currently do.” But more important than presidents increasing their use of commutation, Murphy writes, is their willingness to “address the deep systemic problems in our criminal justice system.”
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New York Times Highlights Urgent Need to Protect Immigration Detainees from Sexual Abuse
02 months ago
The New York Times in an editorial this morning highlights what increasingly is a poorly kept secret but which is no less disturbing nonetheless: the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees caught in the far-reaching web of the nation’s punitive and inhumane immigration detention system are at grave risk of being sexually assaulted and abused.
It is critical the Obama administration ensures that the bipartisan Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), unanimously passed in 2003 to set standards for preventing, detecting and responding to sexual abuse in prisons, applies to immigration detention facilities. The Department of Justice (DOJ) earlier this year proposed a rule that would explicitly exclude immigration detention centers, despite Congress’ clear intent that it should in fact cover immigration detainees. The Obama administration must not allow that proposed rule to stand, and we urge you to join us in calling on President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to make sure that immigration detainees, the vast majority of whom are being held on civil and not criminal charges, be protected under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. On Wednesday at 3 p.m. Congressmen Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) are hosting a Hill Briefing on DOJ’s proposed rule implementing PREA.
Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has gone on record touting what she says is her agency’s “zero tolerance” policy when it comes to the sexual abuse of immigration detainees. But as documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act show, whatever DHS is doing to combat this deeply disturbing problem is not nearly enough. According to the documents, some of which came from DHS’ own Office of the Inspector General, the sexual abuse of immigration detainees is a widespread systemic problem with allegations of assault and abuse being lodged at detention facilities from coast to coast. It is more than clear that this is a problem that is not limited to one rogue facility or merely the result of a handful of bad apple government contractors who staff some of the nation’s immigration detention centers. Indeed, despite the fact that the data in the documents surely represents just the very tip of the iceberg – sexual abuse is a widely underreported problem – the documents crystallize the urgent need for the government to admit just how pervasive a problem sexual abuse is in its immigration jails and take immediate steps to ensure that all detainees are protected.
It is imperative that uniform protections, developed by a unanimous Congress and informed by the expertise of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, are in place to further the elimination of sexual abuse and assault in immigration detention. The current patchwork of unenforceable DHS standards is just not enough. Those standards fail to mandate that facilities allow for multiple routes to report sexual abuse; they lack sufficient provisions for confidential reporting and protection from retaliation; they lack requirements for proper criminal investigations of assaults and specialized post-assault training for investigators and medical staff; and they ignore the abusive use of administrative segregation in response to incidents of sexual abuse.
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ACLU Lens: North Carolina Repeals Historic Legislation Combating Racism in Death Penalty
02 months ago
The North Carolina state Senate late Monday voted to repeal an historic 2009 law that would have helped ensure that death sentences handed down in the state were not the result of racial bias.
The Racial Justice Act allows death row prisoners like Marcus Robinson a hearing in which they can present statistics and other evidence showing that death sentences state- and county-wide were tainted by racism and that their death sentence should be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“We know the death penalty system in North Carolina and across the nation is plagued by discrimination and this law is merely an attempt to ensure that no one is wrongfully sentenced to death because of racial bias,” said Denny LeBoeuf, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. “If a capital case was not tainted by race discrimination, the Racial Justice Act will help prove that. But it is in no one’s interest to uphold death sentences where jurors were excluded, prosecutions were selected or defendants sentenced to death based on the color of their skin.”
Last night’s vote comes after state prosecutors this month intensified their calls for repeal, unhappy with a recent Michigan State University study showing a significantly higher likelihood that prosecutors would eliminate potential African-American jurors and that defendants are more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death if the victim is white than if the victim is black. Prosecutors were also unsuccessful this month in an attempt to oust the African-American judge slated to oversee the first hearing held under the law.
North Carolina, one of 34 states to maintain the death penalty, has the nation’s sixth-largest death row. Well over half of the prisoners on the state’s death row are black.
The repeal legislation approved by the Senate last night, and which was approved in June by the state House, now lands on the desk of Gov. Beverly Perdue, who has the opportunity to veto it and leave the Racial Justice Act intact.
In the News:
- Los Angeles Times: Bias on death row? North Carolina lawmakers now not so sure
- Charlotte News and Observer: Senate derails Racial Justice Act
- Associated Press: NC lawmakers vote to repeal death row law
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ACLU Lens: Oregon Death Penalty Moratorium Latest Step Toward Abolition
02 months ago
Expressing regret that he allowed two executions to go forward 10 years ago, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber yesterday put a moratorium on the state’s death penalty and granted a reprieve to a man scheduled to be killed in two weeks by lethal injection.
In an afternoon news conference, Kitzhaber called the death penalty "compromised and inequitable" and said the state needs "to consider a different approach." Kitzhaber highlighted the enormous cost of maintaining a death penalty system, saying it is much less expensive to sentence people to life in prison without any possibility of parole then to condemn them to death row.
"Yesterday’s courageous decision by Gov. Kitzhaber in Oregon adds to the growing and irreversible momentum toward the complete abolition of the death penalty in this country," said Denny LeBoeuf, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. "The governor was correct to recognize that the death penalty system in his state and across the nation is plagued by systemic injustices and is broken beyond repair. It is arbitrary, discriminatory and costs taxpayers enormous amounts of money. Today we celebrate moratorium in Oregon, recognizing that capital punishment always violates human rights. This is a wonderful step toward the end of the death penalty in our country.”
Gary Haugen was slated to be executed Dec. 6 after disregarding the advice of his lawyers and waiving all of his remaining appeals in protest of a justice system he considers to be unjust and vindictive. The two previous executions under Kitzhaber’s watch, one each in 1996 and 1997, were of men who also volunteered to be put to death by giving up their legal rights. Kitzhaber said yesterday that Oregon voters did not intend to erect a death penalty system in which the only people executed are those who volunteer.
With Kitzhaber’s announcement yesterday, Oregon becomes the latest in a series of states to back away from the use of the death penalty. The New York Court of Appeals ruled the death penalty statute unconstitutional in 2004, the death penalty law in New Jersey was repealed in 2007, New Mexico did the same in 2009 and Illinois abolished the death penalty earlier this year.
In the News:
- New York Times: Oregon Governor Says He Will Block Executions
- Associated Press: Ore. governor bans death penalty for rest of term
- The Oregonian: Gov. John Kitzhaber: Oregon death penalty fails ‘basic standards of justice’
CORRECTION: It was the New York Court of Appeals, not the New York State Supreme Court, that ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 2004.
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The Big Business of Inhumane Detention of Immigrants
03 months ago
The Department of Homeland Security assumes that mass detention is the key to immigration enforcement. But in fact, our detention system locks up thousands of immigrants unnecessarily every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Throughout the next two weeks, check back daily for posts about the costs of immigration detention, both human and fiscal, and what needs to be done to ensure fair and humane policy.
The inhumane and abusive system that is immigration detention in this country is good business for one particular special interest group — the private prison industry.
According to some estimates, nearly 50 percent of the tens of thousands of immigrants in detention every day are locked up in jails and detention systems operated by private prison companies — a reality that crystallizes the private prison industry’s deep financial incentive to see the continued expansion of a system that this blog series has made clear is riddled with myriad abuses.
An ACLU report examining the destructive impact of prison privatization, to be publicly released tomorrow by the National Prison Project, outlines the nefarious connection between the for-profit private prison industry and the expansion during the last decade of immigration detention.
It’s clear that executives in the private prison industry have achieved gigantic profits on the backs of immigration detainees left vulnerable to sexual abuse and even death.
As the report makes clear, private prisons have profited not only from needlessly harsh sentencing policies but also from an unprecedented increase in the number of detained immigrants. In 1994, the average daily population of detained immigrants stood at 6,785. By 2001, the number of immigrants detained at any given time had more than tripled, to 20,429. By 2010, fueled to a significant degree by a post-9/11 increase in reliance on immigration detention, that number stood at 31,020 — an eye-popping 450 percent increase over 1994 levels.
Why? Well at least a part of the answer was provided by National Public Radio, which reported in a 2010 story that the private prison industry engaged in a "quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070," the infamous statute that requires police officers in Arizona to ask people for their papers during law enforcement stops based only on an undefined "reasonable suspicion" that they are in the country unlawfully.
Senate Bill 1070, and similar "copycat" laws since enacted in several other states, have the potential to further increase the number of immigrants detained, thereby adding pressure to build more immigration detention centers — and put even more cash into the pockets of private prison fat cats.
It’s a nasty business, indeed.
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Immigration Detention: A Death Sentence for Far Too Many
03 months ago
The Department of Homeland Security assumes that mass detention is the key to immigration enforcement. But in fact, our detention system locks up thousands of immigrants unnecessarily every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Throughout the next two weeks, check back daily for posts about the costs of immigration detention, both human and fiscal, and what needs to be done to ensure fair and humane policy.
Ahmad Tanveer, a Pakistani New Yorker held in immigration detention at the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J., died in anonymity in 2005 despite telling officials of severe chest pain and pleading for hours for medical assistance — pleas that were not responded to until it was too late.
Tanveer’s death was buried and kept out of public view until, four years later, New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein, with the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union and documents we obtained from the government through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, told his story for the very first time. Even as the Times reported thatstory, government officials had trouble confirming that Tanveer had ever existed, much less had been locked up in immigration detention and had died there.
And as it turned out, Tanveer’s story was not unique.
Nine months later, the Times reported how internal government documents obtained through the ACLU’s FOIA litigation and a separate FOIA request filed by the newspaper showed how top government officials, many held over by the Obama administration, intentionally tried to hide the brutal mistreatment of immigration detainees. This mistreatment contributed to the more than 100 in-custody deaths since late 2003. The documents were obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. The ACLU filed a FOIA lawsuit in 2008 demanding access to any and all documents and information in the government’s possession related to the deaths of detainees at immigration detention centers — the patchwork system of privately run jails, federal prisons and county facilities the government uses to hold undocumented immigrants while it tries to deport them.
The government documents obtained by the ACLU exposed a number of in-custody detainee deaths that the government had not previously made public — deaths the ACLU worked with the Times to bring to light. The deaths underscore the secrecy and lack of any kind of independent accountability that continue to plague the nation’s immigration detention system today, and which leaves in place a system that is ripe for continued abuse and mistreatment of immigration detainees, one of the most vulnerable populations in the country.
In January 2009, for example, the Times reported the death of Guido R. Newbrough, 48, a construction worker born in Germany but who lived in the United States for the last 42 years of his life while sporting a "Raised American" tattoo on his shoulder. Newbrough died Nov. 27, 2008, in a Virginia hospital after being detained for 11 months at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. According to the Times, he died of endocarditis, caused by a virulent staph infection that is typically cured by antibiotics. But as Bernstein wrote, his infection went untreated "despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death."
And the following August, Bernstein reported on the death of Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorian construction worker whose death at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona from a fast-growing but treatable form of testicular cancer that went undiagnosed by government officials was also hidden from public view until exposed by the ACLU.
The ACLU’s FOIA litigation, combined with the Times’ reporting, contributed to a number of major concessions by the Obama administration in 2009. Administration officials announced plans to overhaul the immigration detention system and create "a truly civil detention system," including the end of family detention at the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center in Texas which had been the focus of an ACLU lawsuit. The Obama administration was also forced in August to reveal 11 additional deaths in immigration detention that the government had not previously made public.
But as last week’s investigation by Frontline makes clear — an investigation that also was aided by ACLU FOIA documents — there is nothing "civil" about the abuses that continue to go on behind the closed doors of immigration detention facilities across the country.
The immigration detention system remains in desperate need of far greater levels of independent oversight and transparency than that which currently exits. Congress should pass immigration detention reform as part of any comprehensive immigration reform legislation. And our nation as a whole needs to divorce itself from its reliance on detention in the first place. The vast majority of the people the government has forced into detention didn’t ever warrant being detained, but they nonetheless have been victimized by an unyielding commitment to detention and deportation without the kind of individualized determinations that are the essence of due process.
Being needlessly detained should never turn into a death sentence.
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Under ACLU Fire, Baca Running for Cover
03 months ago
Less than two weeks ago, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca was indignant.
Called to the carpet by an ACLU report documenting dozens of allegations of brutal abuse of inmates at the Los Angeles County Jail at the hands of sheriff’s deputies, Baca held an angry press conference in which he called into question the validity of the allegations and accused the ACLU of engaging in “hyperbole” aimed at winning a quick headline.
But today he is singing a very different tune.
Under intense media criticism and mounting political pressure, Baca yesterday told the New York Times that “we need to be focusing on the issue of respect for the inmates,” a day after announcing he was putting together a “special task force” to investigate the serious allegations the ACLU brought forth in its report.
But Baca’s announcement is a day late and a dollar short. Burned by the glare of the national media’s spotlight, his willingness to conduct an internal investigation, led by hand-picked commanders and lieutenants, is not nearly enough.
For years, top brass in the sheriff’s department have abdicated their constitutional obligation to maintain humane conditions inside the jail, and Baca himself has stone-walled persistent efforts by the ACLU to bring the horrors that occur regularly behind the jail’s closed doors into daylight.
As Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, put it to the New York Times, “The time has long passed when Baca could be the positive agent of change. We’ve been bringing these problems to him for years, and it should have been overwhelmingly obvious to him. What he’s doing now is running for cover.”
A far-reaching and independent investigation of all aspects of the Los Angeles County jail is urgently needed, and that’s why we’re asking you to join us in calling on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the Los Angeles County Jail system and put an end to the unconstitutional and unconscionable abuse of the jail’s prisoners.
But this will also take action by the Obama administration. We need the hammer of a federal injunction. A completely independent monitor needs to be appointed by a federal judge, someone with the authority to track down the root causes of the longstanding culture of deputy violence in the jails and who can implement and carry out a plan to fix what ails the largest jail system in the nation.
Now is the time for desperately-needed sweeping reform.
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ACLU Lens: Rachel Maddow Highlights ACLU Report on Abuse in Los Angeles Jails
04 months ago
In an opening segment last night devoted to calling out politicians for attempting to score political points by being “tough on crime,” Rachel Maddow highlighted an ACLU report released yesterday documenting dozens of stories of brutal violence carried out by sheriff’s deputies against inmates at the Los Angeles County Jail, the largest in the nation.
The court-appointed monitor of the jail since 1985, the ACLU has in past reports detailed deputy-on-inmate abuse in the jails. But yesterday’s report is the first in which chaplain and other civilian eyewitnesses come forward with first-hand accounts.
Combined with thousands of complaints from jail prisoners received by the ACLU in the past year alone — many of which describe attacks so severe that inmates required surgeries, suffered long-lasting injuries and experienced psychological trauma — the stories expose pervasive abuse of inmates at the hands of deputies and an ongoing climate of violence.
That’s why the ACLU yesterday called for the immediate resignation of Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who is in charge of running the jail, and is asking you to help us call on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the Los Angeles County Jail system and put an end to the unconstitutional and unconscionable abuse of the jail’s prisoners.
As Maddow herself put it so eloquently:
It is not about whether you like the person who the guy in uniform is beating up. What this is about is the fact that the guy in the uniform is us. That that is in our name. This is a democracy. Government of, for and by the people…These political fights, every bit as much as who we elect in the next election, will write what history says about who we are as a country.
In the News:
- MaddowBlog: Problems with the justice system are our problems
- Associated Press: ACLU wants US to probe brutality claims at Los Angeles County jails, urges sheriff resignation
- NBC.com: ACLU details deputy brutality in Los Angeles County jails
- Los Angeles Times: Editorial: What’s going on at our jails?
- Reuters: ACLU alleges human rights violations in Los Angeles jails
Take action today. Help stop the abuse in LA’s jails.
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ACLU Lens: Abuse in the Los Angeles County Jails
04 months ago
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Juan Pablo Reyes was punched by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies over and over again in the ribs, mouth and eyes, breaking his eye socket and leaving his body badly bruised. After falling to the ground, the deputies continued to kick Reyes, an inmate at the Los Angeles County Jail, with their steel-toed boots, ignoring his cries.
And the deputies didn’t stop there.
They ordered Reyes to strip and forced him to walk naked up and down the hallway of a housing module, in full view of other inmates. One deputy yelled, "Gay boy walking." Reyes began to cry, but the deputies just looked on and laughed. They then put him in a cell where he was beaten and sexually assaulted by other inmates. He desperately pled for help and to be removed from the cell, but to no avail.
In another incident, an inmate who discovered after deputies had searched all the cells in his row that some of his property was missing was savagely beaten after asking to speak to a sergeant. Deputies beat this inmate so violently he suffered a fractured jaw and required eye surgery and stitches in his ear. A deputy shoved him hard against a wall, slapped his ear, punched his face several times and then threw him to the ground. While on the ground, the inmate was kicked by the deputy roughly 10 times in his face, jaw and back of his head, causing a large pool of his blood to form on the floor. The inmate described the beating as being more painful than being hit by a car.
These stories are just two of dozens documented in the annual report on the Los Angeles County Jail system, the largest in the nation, released today by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Southern California.
The court-appointed monitor of the jail since 1985, the ACLU has in past reports detailed deputy-on-inmate abuse in the jails. But today’s report is the first in which a chaplain and other civilian eyewitnesses come forward with first-hand accounts.
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Combined with thousands of complaints from jail prisoners received by the ACLU in the past year alone — many of which describe attacks so severe that inmates required surgeries, suffered long-lasting injuries and experienced psychological trauma — the stories expose pervasive abuse of inmates at the hands of deputies and an ongoing climate of violence.
But perhaps even more shocking than the violence itself is the fact that it has been allowed to exist for years under Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who has covered up and ignored repeated claims of brutality.
According to Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project who has litigated against unconstitutional jail conditions for decades for the ACLU, the Los Angeles County Jail is the worst of the worst.
No jail in the nation matches the level of pervasive, savage, long-standing and notorious deputy-on-inmate violence of the kind we see in the Los Angeles County Jail system. But what is most stunning of all is the stubborn refusal of Sheriff Baca, the man in charge, to acknowledge there’s even a problem.
Baca has repeatedly sought to downplay the problems, he insists that when problems arise they are adequately addressed and says that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is capable of policing itself.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as the ACLU report today makes clear. That’s why the ACLU today is calling for Baca’s immediate resignation, and demanding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder launch an independent criminal and civil rights investigation into the allegations documented in the ACLU’s report.
In the news:
- New York Times: Report Details Wide Abuse in Los Angeles Jail System
- Los Angeles Times: Jail volunteers accuse deputies of abusing L.A. County prisoners
- Los Angeles Times: FBI probing reports of beatings in L.A. County jails
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ACLU Lens: Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole Denies Clemency to Troy Davis Despite Serious Doubts About his Guilt
04 months ago
The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole today denied clemency to Troy Davis, despite serious concerns that he was wrongfully convicted in 1989 for killing a police officer.
Calling yesterday’s clemency hearing "a sham," Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said:
The execution of Troy Davis is, to use Justice Stevens’ words, "perilously close to simple murder." His conviction is forever tainted by significant doubt. Stranger eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and the eyewitnesses in this case — most of whom have recanted — say they were pressured by law enforcement, eager to close the murder of a police officer. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations itself says the jury was misled into believing that the gun used in the killing matched Troy’s.
The jury was deceived, witnesses were pressured, and virtually no one who looks at the case today would claim that Troy Davis could be convicted, let alone sentenced to death, for the murder.
Troy Davis went to the Georgia Pardon and Parole hearing on Monday with justice, science, and popular opinion on his side. What he didn’t have is political power, but the death penalty in the United States is primarily about the politics of power, not about law or justice. Troy Davis’s execution, if it occurs, will be in violation of international human rights law and the Constitution. It diminishes us all. The ACLU will continue to work for abolition of the death penalty. "I am Troy Davis" was the slogan chanted by over three thousand supporters in a march the week before the sham clemency proceeding.
Today, I am Troy Davis.
Denny LeBoeuf, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project adds:
The refusal today by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Troy Davis clemency underscores the vast systemic injustices that plague our death penalty system. No innocent person should ever be put to death, and it is unconscionable and unconstitutional to carry out an execution where, as in Troy’s case, significant doubts exist. The death penalty system in the United States is arbitrary, discriminatory and comes at an enormous cost to taxpayers, and it must be ended.
Davis has been scheduled for execution three times before, and three times his execution has been stayed amid doubts and new evidence against other suspects. Davis was sentenced on the basis of witness testimony, but seven of nine original witnesses have since recanted or changed their testimony.
Last week, activists delivered to the Board over 650,000 signatures — including 40,000 by local Georgians — from petitions created all over the world, calling on the Board to stop the execution. Add to that more than 200,000 signers from Change.org and thousands of other online action alerts, emails, letters, faxes and phone calls, and nearly one million people have taken a stand for Troy Davis.
One of those million is Bob Barr, the former prosecutor, Georgia Attorney General, and congressional Representative who nicely articulated the Parole Board’s dilemma. So is William Sessions, another conservative Georgia native who used to serve as Director of the FBI.
According to these pro-death penalty prosecutors, Troy was required to prove his own innocence — an impossibly high burden. In 2010, the judge acknowledged the presence of doubt in Troy’s guilt and called the case "not ironclad," but said this doubt is insufficient to stop the execution.
We can’t afford to execute people who might be innocent — let alone people who probably are.
In the news:
- New York Times: Georgia Pardons Board Denies Clemency for Georgia Inmate
- USA Today: Georgia pardons board denies clemency for Troy Davis
- The Guardian: Troy Davis execution: Georgia’s pardons board denies clemency
- Time: Georgia denies clemency for Troy Davis:
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