Every year, the ACLU of RI lobbies on hundreds of bills during Rhode Island's annual Legislative Session. Below are some of the bills we have tracked and testified on before the General Assembly. For more info on advocating for the issues you care about, check out our Advocacy 101 Guide. To see how your Reps and Senators voted on various bills over the past few years, visit our Legislative Scorecards page.
We opposed a provision in a bill addressing disability benefits based on occupationally-related PTSD for first responders, noting that it could allow police officers to recoup disability benefits if they alleged to suffer from PTSD from misconduct that they have themselves inflicted on a civilian.
We supported a variety of legislation which proposed to decriminalize certain drugs entirely or to change the threshold for which the possession of a certain amount of a controlled substance becomes a crime.
Following the 2021 implementation of a statewide infrastructure for a body-worn camera (BWC) program, we supported legislation which would have put in place statutory policies regarding BWCs.
We strongly opposed a bill which would have banned terms like “racial guilt” in the classroom, barred the use of school books that have a "viewpoint," and required school staff to address students by “the pronouns associated with their biological gender.”
We opposed legislation that would have allowed the Attorney General’s health care advocate (HCA) to receive unredacted confidential health care information of individuals without consent.
We opposed legislation criminalizes parental actions if they created a “substantial and unjustifiable risk” of serious bodily injury to a child.