News & Commentary

We know almost nothing about how Earl Ringo Jr. was executed in the early hours of the morning by the State of Missouri. Missouri deliberately hid crucial facts about its lethal injection drugs and their administration, blocking the public from understanding how capital punishment is carried out in our name. This state government took the secrecy one step further, its officials telling outright lies under oath about what could happen to Mr. Ringo and others scheduled for execution. We need our courts to care enough to demand the truth. We need other states' governors to put a halt to executions until we have answers to the most basic questions about lethal injection.

A lot of people think that the fight for the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples is all about legal filings, demonstrations and news coverage. I'm here to tell you that it's not: it's about real people, real lives and sometimes, real tragedy. Today, as I was readying the ACLU's response to two separate Supreme Court filings, I was reminded of Midori Fujii and Garth Wangemann, their struggles and why I want to make the case for them (and so many others) in the highest court in the land as soon as possible.

...You wouldn't like it when it's angry. And it's kinda angry.

Three strikes and you're out of your home and on the street – all because you called 911 for help. That was the nightmare faced by Lakisha Briggs and other residents of Norristown, Pa.

According to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Henry Lee McCollum deserved to die for the brutal rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. There's just one problem, and a frequent one in death penalty cases: Henry Lee McCollum didn't do it.

While it may be technically possible for there to be a sufficiently good reason to cut early voting – one that isn't just a sorry excuse for voter suppression – we haven't seen it yet.
Yesterday

I had just finished a conversation with a local reporter comparing the events in Ferguson, Missouri with the disproportionate arrests of black people in Shreveport, Louisiana, for nonviolent offenses, when I noticed the driver had taken an interest in my phone call.

We may have reached the point where video technology is producing a full-fledged revolution in policing. That revolution has been crystalized, or at least revealed by, the events in Ferguson.

Writing in the New Republic, Yishai Schwartz notes the confluence of two privacy stories yesterday: the theft of celebrities’ private nude photos stored in Apple’s iCloud, and my colleague Alexander Abdo’s argument before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in our challenge to the NSA’s domestic telephone metadata collection program. Schwartz argues that we and other privacy advocates are misguided to place such focus on the NSA because “the real danger to contemporary privacy isn’t government intrusion at all: It’s the weaknesses of private corporations.”