News & Commentary

Washington is slowly getting back into the swing of things following its annual winter hibernation when the streets are empty and it's relatively easy to get a table at all the new restaurants that line 14th St NW. Now, not so much.

According to the Minnesota Department of Corrections website, CeCe McDonald is expected to be released today from the Minnesota men's prison where she has served 19 months of her 41 month sentence stemming from her controversial manslaughter conviction.

The U.S. government took its first prisoners to Guantánamo Bay 12 years ago today.

In what state did a hidden cameraman capture police using excessive force and seizing the cameras of those attempting to film the encounter?

Yesterday, a federal district court in Massachusetts ordered the government to provide Mark Anthony Reid, a U.S. Army veteran who has spent over a year in immigration detention, with the basic due process of an immigration bond hearing. The court held that the government may not detain individuals like Reid for more than six months without a hearing to determine if they need to be imprisoned.

On Friday, Attorney General Holder confirmed that the federal government would continue recognizing the nearly 1,400 marriages issued to same-sex couples in Utah between December 20, 2013 and January 6, 2014. Holder said, "These families should not be asked to endure uncertainty regarding their status as the litigation unfolds." The ACLU strongly agrees.

The Wyoming Department of Corrections (WDOC) prohibits Jewish prisoners in Wyoming from wearing a kippah (also known as a yarmulke) anywhere other than in their own cells or during religious services. Today, the ACLU and the ACLU of Wyoming sent a letter to the WDOC on behalf of an Orthodox Jewish prisoner, Clarence E. Fisher, whose religious beliefs require him to wear his kippah at all times. By prohibiting prisoners from wearing religious headgear outside of their cells and religious services, the WDOC forces Fisher and other prisoners to violate their core religious beliefs, and that violates the law.

It's a new year, and by now you've probably made your resolutions to be a new you. We wish the same were true for some anti-choice members of Congress. They've decided they rather enjoyed living in the past, particularly 2011, also known as the year of the war on women, and have resolved to again pass the misleadingly titled No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7). This is definitely one bill that should be forgot and never brought to mind again.

While I was semi-disconnected from the grid over the holidays, one of the things I missed was an article in the Washington Post detailing the results of a poll on Americans’ privacy attitudes. The article, which contains lots of “man on the street” interviews with a range of views on privacy (including the usual “I have nothing to hide” viewpoint), correctly points out that in the interpersonal realm, “there are not yet widely accepted norms about who may watch whom and when and where tracking is justified.”