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.
An important piece of criminal justice legislation would have clarified the language surrounding the definition of “felony” and “misdemeanor” under Rhode Island law.
Though intended to address the issue of police misconduct, we opposed a piece of legislation introduced on behalf of the Attorney General which could have given the state more power to investigate those...
A bill introduced to remove the sunset provision in a law which established a team within the Department of Health to review drug-related overdoses prompted our opposition to language which continued to...
We supported this bill which proposes measures to increase teacher diversity.
The ACLU has long opposed the introduction of SROs to school campuses in RI, as their presence can inappropriately redefine normal adolescent behaviors into issues of criminal justice. Two pieces of...
This comprehensive legislation, supported by the ACLU and more than two dozen other advocacy groups, was introduced to build upon the successfully implemented changes of the 2020 election cycle.