Legislation

On May 2, Governor Chafee signed long-overdue legislation establishing full marriage equality in Rhode Island.

An ACLU bill designed to protect privacy in the criminal justice system died this year.

The ACLU of RI testified in February before the House Labor committee in opposition to a bill making E-Verify use mandatory by Rhode Island employers, and in favor of a bill keeping the E-Verify program voluntary.

The ACLU testified in support of legislation barring law enforcement from searching the contents of a cell phone without first obtaining a warrant.

ACLU of RI-drafted legislation would have protected users’ private social media profiles from undue intrusion by barring schools and employers from requesting or requiring students’, employees’ or applicants’ social media passwords, or otherwise gaining access to their private social media accounts.

For the seventh year in a row, the ACLU of RI was part of a diverse coalition of organizations advocating for passage of the Comprehensive Racial Profiling Prevention Act.

This legislation generally prohibits employers from asking if applicants have been convicted of a crime at the initial application process, giving applicants a chance to be interviewed and an opportunity for employers to see an applicant’s qualifications and not solely their mistakes.

In some tension with its passage of “ban the box” legislation, the General Assembly this year continued its trend of pushing to impose criminal background checks on applicants for a number of employment and volunteer positions.

Legislation aimed to restore representation in Rhode Island to “one person, one vote” by requiring, for the purposes of redistricting, prisoners to be identified as living at their last known address.