Legislation

Though hate crimes deserve condemnation, we opposed a piece of legislation that would have expanded the scope of the Hate Crimes Sentencing Act in a way which could have established a hate crime based solely on the defendant’s speech without a finding of animus.

A proposed article in the FY 2022 budget contained several important criminal justice proposals, including provisions providing for geriatric parole and making critical adjustments to statutes concerning community confinement, work-release wages, and parole reform.

We supported this important bill which would ensure that the Rhode Island Promise Program – which provides free tuition to students attending CCRI – appropriately accommodates students with disabilities.

Noting that this bill was not only an assault on free speech but that it would inappropriately quash important teaching and conversation around such issues as institutional racism or sexism, we opposed legislation which sought to ban the teaching of “divisive topics” in public schools.

As students largely transitioned to virtual education over the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic, issues of student privacy on school-loaned devices rightly crept to the forefront of public conversation.

As the likelihood of recreational marijuana legalization in RI advances, it has become even more critical to ensure that civil liberties and social equity concerns are prioritized and centered. Both the proposed FY 2022 budget and standalone legislation seek to do so, but far from comprehensively.

For over a decade, our organization has maintained that the inclusion of personal health care and medical information through the RI Health Insurance Exchange (HIE) must be on a strictly voluntary basis through an opt-in, rather than an opt-out, system.

In opposing this legislation which would have lowered the age which would define an “elder” from 65 to 60 years old for the purposes of the criminal offense of “exploiting an elder,” we noted the extremely harsh penalties in the statute.

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 make law enforcement personnel central to the composition of the team.