by TChris

The First Amendment prevailed in a dispute over an Oklahoma school's attempt to prevent a 12-year-old Muslim student from wearing a head scarf to school. The Muskogee Public School District agreed to change its dress code to make exceptions for religious apparel. (TalkLeft's prior coverage of the dispute is here.)

There hasn't been much cause to praise John Ashcroft's Justice Department, but its civil rights division did the right thing by protecting the free exercise of religion in this case. The dress code was a rather broad attempt to deter gang members from wearing clothing identifying themselves as gang members, but was mindlessly enforced without regard to its purpose. Props to Justice for setting the school district straight.

The U.S. is suing Greenpeace over an 1872 law. Trial began today. We've written about the background of the case and criticized the Government for it several times--calling it an example of the Justice Dept.'s "out of control prosecution policy" and warning that:

If successful, will have an extreme chilling effect on the right of all protest groups to aggressively exercise their First Amendment rights.

Never before has our government criminally prosecuted an entire organization for the free speech activities of its supporters.

The basic facts:

Three miles off the Florida coast in April of 2002, two Greenpeace activists clambered from an inflatable rubber speedboat onto a cargo ship. They were detained before they could unfurl a banner, spent the weekend in custody and two months later were sentenced to time served for boarding the ship without permission. It was a routine act of civil disobedience until, 15 months after the incident, federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Greenpeace itself for authorizing the boarding. The group says the indictment represents a turning point in the history of American dissent.

More background here. Today's trial news is here.

by TChris

If the Bush administration had its way, we wouldn't know anything about the ACLU's lawsuit challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that requires telephone companies and ISP's to hand over a customer's records to the FBI without notice to the customer. Because the law prohibits the communications company from revealing the existence of the FBI's demand, the ACLU filed its suit "under seal," keeping it out of the public record of court filings. The ACLU then asked the court to unseal the lawsuit. Predictably, the government doesn't think it's use (or abuse) of the Patriot Act is anybody's business; it asked the court to keep everything about the case a secret.

Judge Victor Marrero is looking for a middle ground. He's likely to release those documents (in whole or in part) that would not jeopardize national security. Of course, the government will argue that releasing anything but the ACLU's address will jeopardize national security, but it's likely that enough information will be released to provide a better sense of the facts upon which the suit is based.

The ACLU is joined in the suit by an unidentified recipient of a demand for records -- presumably a communications company.

The A.C.L.U. argues that the F.B.I. letters are unconstitutional because they violate the due process rights of the businesses and people who receive them, and because the order prohibiting discussion of the investigation violates free expression rights. The group contends that the government should be required to seek approval from a judge before issuing a letter and recipients should have a way to question the order.

When the ACLU posted a general description of the lawsuit on its website and included some scheduling information, the government told the ACLU to remove the scheduling information -- in the apparent belief that the public has no right to know whether or when the court will act in the lawsuit. After Judge Marrero allowed the release of some documents, the ACLU restored a statement that the suit will probably be heard at the end of the summer.

Just in time for the election. No wonder the Justice Department wants to keep it quiet.

by TChris

Another story of one person taking a stand and making a difference: Kenneth Lavon Johnson sat at a "whites only" lunch counter in 1960. He stayed at the counter after being refused service, was arrested, convicted, sentenced to jail, and expelled from Southern University School of Law. A unanimous Supreme Court reversed his conviction in 1961. In Johnson's words: "The civil rights movement was on the move."

Johnson entered Howard University School of Law, graduated, and eventually became a judge in Baltimore. Now he's returning to Southern University. The school that expelled him is awarding him an honorary juris doctrate degree.

It is a sweet honor because I lived through it; I thought I was going to get killed when we sat at that counter. It's sweet also because, I hope, it will teach young people they can take stands in life for a cause greater than themselves. They probably will lose today, but if they are patient and persevere and endure as we did, they probably will win tomorrow. And the world will be better for their efforts.

by TChris

Some people never learn.

David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was released to a halfway house in Baton Rouge, La., a month ago after serving a year in federal prison for fraud, has been meeting his work release obligations by performing duties for the "white civil rights" group where he is president, he said yesterday.

His job duties are unclear. Washing sheets and hoods, perhaps?

Via Demi-Semi Blog:

Immigrant rights and public health groups are urgently trying to raise public opposition to a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 3722, cynically titled the "Undocumented Alien Emergency Medical Assistance Amendments of 2004." The bill would provide a billion dollars to pay hospitals for care of undocumented immigrants, but at a ghastly moral price: it would force hospitals that accept federal money for the care of an "undocumented alien" patient under the new Medicare bill to demand information about the patient's citizenship status.

For "undocumented aliens" (no word on how hospitals are to identify this group in the first place) the bill would tell hospitals to obtain further personal information plus fingerprints or other "identifiers," and would then expect them to denounce their own patients to the immigration authorities. Per the advocacy groups' analyses, the bill would cause people who lack proper papers to avoid medical care and would put doctors under pressure to violate basic requirements of medical ethics.

by TChris

The Associated Press and The Hattiesburg American have sued the U.S. Marshals office as a result of the decision by U.S. Deputy Marshal Melanie Rube to seize and erase recordings of a speech given by recording-phobic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. TalkLeft's coverage of the issue is here and here.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, seeks an order to prohibit the Marshals Service from seizing recording devices from reporters involved in the gathering of news. It also asks for guarantees to keep the federal agency from erasing tapes regardless of whether the seizure is lawful or not.

In essence, Luther Munford, an attorney representing the Hattiesburg American and The Associated Press, said in a prepared statement that the news organizations are seeking "a judgment that tells the U.S. Marshals Service and, in effect, other law enforcement agencies, not to do this again."

The lawsuit contends that the Marshals violated the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, as well as the federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980. The president of Gannett Company's newspaper division, which owns the American, explains that somebody needs to police the police.

"Given the federal government's very tough stance on those who violate the law, the Marshals Service and Deputy Rube must be willing to taste their own medicine," Watson said. "An apology or a hollow commitment to study the issue will not suffice nor serve as a meaningful deterrent to prevent any repeat performances," he said.

As Associated Press assistant general counsel Dave Tomlin said: "People who enforce the law should know what the law is, and especially the basic law that says citizens can't be shaken down by their own government."

Anthony Lewis has a terrific column in the new Mother Jones, One Liberty At a Time, in which he argues:

From the cages at Gunatanamo to a jail cell in Brooklyn, the administration isn't just threatening the rights of a few detainees—it's undermining the very foundation of democracy.

It is not just for Guantanamo that the alarm bells of American liberty should be sounding. Civil liberties are more broadly in a perilous state.... In the name of fighting terrorism, President Bush and his administration have abruptly overridden rights protected by the Constitution and international law. Ideas foreign to American principles—detention without trial, denial of access to lawyers, years of interrogation in isolation—are now American practices.

The danger of what is happening is more profound than the denial of justice to some individuals. The Bush administration is really attacking a basic premise of the American system: that we have a government under law.

by TChris

The ugly practice of racial profiling in traffic stops continues.

A study has found that nearly three out of four Massachusetts police departments engaged in racial profiling of minority drivers, prompting the state to launch a probe.

Police in Boston, Springfield, and Worcester were the worst offenders.

So far, there is no plan to end the practice. Instead, some police departments will be required to collect more data about the reasons for their traffic stops, a rather insignificant burden that the police chiefs' association predictably labels a "witch hunt." The data will be analyzed again after another year.

From a press release of the National Network for Immigrants and Refugees Rights (NIRR)

Representatives Luis Gutierrez (IL-D), Bob Menendez (NJ-D) and Senator Kennedy (MA-D) today introduced the Democrats’ immigration reform proposal, “Safe, Orderly, Legal Visas and Enforcment Act of 2004” or “SOLVE.” Unlike the immigration proposal outlined by President Bush in January, this proposal came in the form of a substantive legislative bill that addresses legalization, family reunification and an immigrant worker program with access to permanent residency.

The new bill proposes access to legal status through “earned” legalization for undocumented immigrant workers currently in the U.S. It also specifies immigration law changes to address the backlog of potential immigrants seeking visas and would remove the barriers to visa applications, such as the “3 and 10 year re-entry bars” that have been added during the last decade.

Here are more specifics:

A Muslim civil rights group, Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), has issued a report on attacks on U.S. Muslims this past year, and says they reached a record number:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said it received 1,019 claims of physical and verbal abuse, up from 602 the previous year. It said Muslims were harassed at work, in schools and in their communities.

Fears of terror attacks after 11 September 2001 and the Iraq conflict contributed to the increase, it said. The Cair also blamed what it called Muslim-bashing in the US media and the misapplication of the country's anti-terrorism bill, known as the Patriot Act.

by TChris

Every now and then, someone gets charged with a crime (usually a version of disorderly conduct) for uttering a naughty word in public. Courts often find that language common in locker rooms, high schools, and HBO isn't entitled to constitutional protection if, uttered publicly, it disturbs someone, or might have, particularly if the profanity falls upon the tender ears of a minor.

The Supreme Court declined to take a case that tested the limits of the government's ability to criminalize foul language. Malachi Robinson, a candidate for Stupid Criminal of the Week --

was walking down the street about midnight four years ago when he called the Missoula county deputy in a nearby squad car a "(expletive) pig." The deputy got out and confronted Robinson, who uttered another expletive at the officer.

It should come as no surprise that Robinson was arrested. But, unnecessarily obnoxious and offensive as Robinson was being, didn't he have a right to express his opinion about public employees? He didn't cause a confrontation; the officer could have stayed in the squad car. Police officers aren't children; they might not like what they hear, but this probably wasn't the first time the officer had encountered abusive opinions about law enforcement. Shouldn't the first amendment protect the right to be publicly disrespectful?