California Marriage Ban Struck Down

ACLU Hails Historic Decision and Urges Efforts in Other States to Ensure Success on Appeal

For Immediate Release: August 4, 2010
Copyright Michael B. Woolsey

SAN FRANCISCO -- In a landmark decision today, a federal judge ruled that Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that excluded same-sex couples from marriage in the state, violates the United States Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and Lambda Legal filed two friend-of-the-court briefs in the case supporting the argument that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

"Today's decision is a huge victory for the LGBT people of America. For the first time, a federal court has conducted a trial and found that there is absolutely no reason to deny same-sex couples the fairness and dignity of marriage," said James Esseks, Director of the ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project. "At the same time, we know that this is not the end. In order to give this case the best possible chance of success as it moves through the appeals courts, we need to show that America is ready for same-sex couples to marry by continuing to seek marriage and other relationship protections in states across the country. It's simply not fair, and not legal, to continue to exclude committed same-sex couples from marriage.'

CAIR, ALC and ACLU Documenting FBI Surveillance Practices
Call for Stories & Know Your Rights

FBI Questioning(Sacramento, CA, 07/22/10) - The San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento offices of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU) are working together to document surveillance practices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with respect to South Asian, Arab, and Muslim communities in Northern California, and the impacts of these practices.

In recent months, there has been a notable increase in complaints by community members of FBI visits. The community members who have reported visits by the FBI have been of diverse backgrounds, both ethnically and geographically, and varying levels of religious practice. We have seen a special emphasis on individuals who have ties to, or have visited Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Through this project, the ACLU, ALC, and CAIR seek to identify patterns of overly intrusive conduct and empower community members with information about their rights and the resources available to them. We are also interested in learning about positive interactions with the FBI to be sure our investigation is balanced.

The project plan is two-fold:

Let's Cut the Death Penalty and Save California $126 Million a Year
Ramona Ripston is the Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California
Posted: July 19, 2010 02:34 PM

The California Supreme Court has just 'sentenced' our state's taxpayers to an additional debt of $180,000 more per year. How? The state's high court upheld the death penalty in two cases.

Imposing the death penalty adds enormously to the cost of prosecution and permanent lifetime housing for an inmate. The death penalty is certainly a polarizing public policy issue, but I wonder how many people realize that it's also a vortex-like drain on their own pocketbooks.

Whether you're for or against the death penalty, you are paying for it. And Californians are paying more for it than any other state. Here are the staggering numbers, from a report by the ACLU of Northern California:
$90,000 a year - taxpayers' extra cost of holding one inmate on death row, over and above the cost of keeping an inmate in the general prison population
$10.9 million - taxpayers' cost of one death penalty trial, based on the records of a sample of trials
$117 million a year - taxpayers' cost of seeking execution, after conviction, for inmates throughout the state

Altogether, Californians spend as much per year in pursuit of executions as the salaries of more than 2,500 experienced teachers, or 2,250 new California Highway Patrol officers.

URGENT PRESS ADVISORY
Sunday, July 11, 2010
For more information contact: Rebecca Sandoval 916 505-8947

Monday Daybook/Assignment Desk

LONG-AWAITED TRIAL TESTING GANG INJUNCTION
SET in YOLO COUNTY; COMMUNITY RALLIES MONDAY,
CALLING INJUNCTION UNNEEDED and RACIALLY BIASED

WOODLAND – Residents here and from surrounding counties will rally here Monday
morning at a 9 a.m. news conference at the entrance to Yolo County Courthouse
against a so-called “gang injunction” that civil libertarians say violates civil
rights and has been criticized by the community it purportedly seeks to protect.

Opening motions will be heard Monday morning, with a trial set for Tuesday in
Dept. 1 on the injunction that was first proposed and allowed to be implemented
several years ago despite protestations by residents of Broderick and Bryte who
claim the injunction is unneeded and racially motivated.

CLS v. Martinez: The Supreme Court Rightly Holds that Public Law Schools Can Deny Affiliation and Funding to Religious Groups that Discriminate Against Gay Students

By MARCI A. HAMILTON

Thursday, July 1, 2010

This Monday, June 28, the Supreme Court decided Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, striking a blow for higher education in the United States.

As I discussed in a prior column, the Christian Legal Society (CLS) argued that Hastings Law School (a public law school that is part of the University of California system) had discriminated against it. In particular, CLS claimed that the law school discriminatorily refused to place its imprimatur on CLS, or to provide CLS with the funding that student groups typically receive.

Why did Hastings withhold affiliation and funding from CLS? Because CLS's policies exclude homosexuals from positions of full membership or leadership in the organization.

Hastings has a non-discrimination policy -- reflecting California law -- that extends to "race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation," and it deemed the exclusion to constitute sexual-orientation discrimination.

The Court's decision in favor of Hastings is sound at every level, as I will explain.

This is a good summary of the questions involved in the apprehension of a murder suspect, and new technology intruding onto our lives

Via boingboing

As far as I know, this is the first "familial DNA" arrest in California. There are some concerning privacy implications, particularly when one combines physical data-gathering (collecting DNA not just from the suspect but from relatives or others in the suspect's social network) with the sort of ambient, online data-gathering manifest in services like Google Street View. No one will argue that a serial killer should roam free, or that all available technology shouldn't be used to solve violent crimes, particularly a case involving as many deaths over as many decades as this one does. But how might these technologies be mis-used in the future? Guess we'll find out.

Related: Google admits to snooping on personal data