News & Commentary

On the evening of June 28, 2012, Claudia Valdez called the police for help. An argument with her husband at the time had turned physical and she feared for her safety and that of her three young children. She ran to her neighbor’s house with her kids in tow and asked for help. Police arrived and ended up arresting Claudia, who is an undocumented immigrant, on a misdemeanor domestic violence charge which was dismissed soon after.

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, however, refused to release Claudia. Instead, she was kept in jail because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, had requested that the sheriff hold Claudia in detention while it investigated her immigration status.   

The sheriff’s office, like most others in Colorado at the time, chose to comply with the federal government’s request, imprisoning Claudia for three additional days without a warrant and without probable cause. Those were three anguished days for Claudia who had never had a run-in with the law apart from minor traffic offenses, and who never dreamed that calling the police for help would land her in a cold jail cell apart from her children. Still, years after the incident she does not believe she can trust the police.

As we suspected, local law enforcement officials are borrowing cell phone tracking devices known as “stingrays” from the U.S. Marshals Service—and police are deliberately concealing the use of stingrays in court documents submitted to judges in criminal investigations.

Last night marked the first executions in this country since the horrifically botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.

Welcome to Alabama, the state of the never-ending seat belt ticket.

Something remarkable happened last night: A bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives agreed on something.

In the second season opener of Orange is the New Black, the show's heroine Piper uses her breakfast to paint a bird on the wall. A month alone in a cell the size of a parking spot has clearly messed with her head. Thirty minutes later, a row of naked prisoners opt to bend over and "spread 'em" rather than be sent to solitary. Mentions of "the SHU" — Security Housing Unit or Segregated Housing Unit — continue like this. In almost every episode of the second season of Orange Is the New Black, solitary confinement looms large, representing a villain even more terrifying than Vee, the show's new violent and manipulative matriarch.

By all accounts, Landon Wilson served with honor in the U.S. Navy during a short, but distinguished military career. He was trained as a cryptologic technician, at great expense to the military, and eventually served in Afghanistan where he assisted with Special Operations missions. The reason Landon's military career was cut short was not of his own choosing, and it was certainly not a reflection on his capabilities or desire to serve.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today in Jones v. Dirty World Entertainment, a case in which the ACLU filed an amicus brief alongside other organizations urging the Sixth Circuit to reverse a lower court’s decision holding a website and its editor accountable for defamatory posts submitted by the website’s users. (Here is our prior blog post explaining the case, and the website itself, TheDirty.com.)

It was a frigid winter night, and my daughter Sarah was in her college years. She called to ask me to drive up to Burlington, Vermont, as soon as possible. She had something important to tell me. During the four-hour drive, my mind raced with the possibilities of what could be wrong. When I got there Sarah burst into tears. She wanted to tell me that she and a female friend were in love and were moving in together.