News & Commentary

The Rhode Island ACLU has settled a federal lawsuit on behalf of former state Senator Michael Damiani against the City of East Providence, which in 2007 conditioned his appointment as an Assistant Harbormaster on passing a “vigorous” physical exam. The lawsuit, filed by ACLU volunteer attorney Carolyn A. Mannis, had argued that the requirement violated Damiani’s rights under various employment anti-discrimination laws. Under the settlement agreement announced today, the City has agreed to pay Damiani $7,000 in damages, as well as $15,000 in attorney’s fees.

The Rhode Island ACLU today announced the favorable settlement  of its federal lawsuit against the Division of Motor Vehicles for advising thousands of motorists earlier this year that their license and registration would be suspended due to alleged unpaid fines that sometimes went back decades. The lawsuit called the DMV notices “facially unconstitutional,” as they gave recipients no information about the nature of the alleged offense leading to the suspension, the penalty for the offense, or even the date that the offense purportedly took place.

The Rhode Island ACLU today announced the favorable settlement of a suit it filed against the City of Pawtucket in July, charging city officials with violating a state law that restricts random drug testing in the workplace.

The Rhode Island ACLU today filed a lawsuit on behalf of a mother who has been barred from volunteering at her child’s elementary school because she has a past criminal history of drug addiction. This is so despite the fact that the mother’s drug problems predate her child’s birth and she has been involved since then in promoting drug abuse prevention.

The Rhode Island ACLU has today filed an appeal with the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education to contest the planned implementation of a mandatory school uniform policy in Woonsocket public schools. The complaint, filed by RI ACLU volunteer attorney John W. Dineen, is on behalf of four parents – Monique Richard, Lisa Desplaines, Angela Lemoine and Tiffany Johnson – and their children. Although the policy is effective September 1st, the ACLU has been advised by school officials that it will not be enforced for thirty days.

Having received dozens of pages of documents as the result of an open records lawsuit filed in February, the Rhode Island ACLU and the R.I. Chapter of the National Organization for Women said today that Rhode Island needs to join eight other states by passing legislation next year to restrict the Department of Correction’s ability to shackle pregnant inmates in its custody.

From law schools across the nation, twenty professors of legal ethics today filed a “friend of the court” brief opposing efforts by former Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah and the Family Court magistrates that preside over Truancy Court proceedings, to remove two National ACLU attorneys from a lawsuit challenging the legality of various Truancy Court practices. The defendants have claimed that the exercise of free speech rights by the attorneys, Robin Dahlberg and Yelena Konanova, by holding a press conference to describe their clients’ claims, constituted “reckless professional misconduct,” and that they should not be permitted to appear in the Rhode Island courts. But the law professors’ brief argues that their public comments constituted “core political speech protected by the First Amendment” and were permitted under the Rhode Island Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys. The law professors argued that granting the defendants' motion would unconstitutionally “chill the robust debate necessary for democratic governance.”

The Rhode Island ACLU on Tuesday will ask the FBI to turn over records related to the agency’s collection and use of race and ethnicity data in local communities. According to a 2008 FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about and map so-called “ethnic-oriented” businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations. ACLU affiliate offices across the nation are filing coordinated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on Tuesday to uncover records about this activity from their local FBI field offices.

In response to thousands of pages of discovery documents turned over to ACLU attorneys by the Wyatt Detention Facility, the RI ACLU has today named eight additional defendants, including Memorial Hospital, in its federal lawsuit on behalf of the family of Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng, who died while in the custody of immigration officials at the Central Falls detention center. Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese detainee, died in August 2008 after complaining for months to prison officials about being in excruciating pain. Guards and medical personnel at Wyatt had continually accused Ng of faking his illness and denied him medical care; he was only diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and a broken spine less than a week before he died.