News & Commentary

The Rhode Island ACLU today applauded the General Assembly for approving a series of civil liberties-protective bills over the veto of Governor Donald Carcieri. The three pieces of legislation – covering the right to privacy, civil rights, and gay rights – were enacted into law yesterday by overwhelming margins.

The RI ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit against the Town of Johnston and police chief Richard Tamburini for illegally releasing the private driver's license information of a firefighter to a Town Councilman as part of a public dispute between the Council and the Fire Department. The lawsuit, filed by RI ACLU volunteer attorney James Kelleher, is on behalf of town resident and firefighter Edward Simone, who was the victim of the disclosure.

The Rhode Island ACLU has asked the state Department of Health to reconsider an order it issued against Rhode Island Hospital on November 2nd, requiring video and audiotaping of surgeries at the facility.

Three organizations involved in patients’ rights issues issued a statement today supporting Rhode Island Hospital’s recent refusal to turn over private medical information about a patient to Providence Police officials. The statement from the groups – the R.I. Medical Society, the R.I. Disability Law Center and the R.I. ACLU – in response to the controversy follows below:

Calling the technology “expensive, ineffective, inefficient and intrusive of civil liberties,” the Rhode Island ACLU today issued a report criticizing legislative efforts to make permanent a three-year experiment allowing municipalities to use “red light cameras.” The 19-page report argues that “no compelling rationale has been offered for allowing for the continued use of red light cameras in the state.”

The Rhode Island ACLU has today filed a lawsuit against the Town of Narragansett, challenging the constitutionality of its highly-publicized ordinance which allows police to charge tenants and landlords with allowing, and to place orange stickers on houses that have allegedly been the site of, “unruly gatherings.” The lawsuit, filed in R.I. Superior Court by ACLU volunteer attorney H. Jefferson Melish, is on behalf of the URI Student Senate, as well as four students and three landlords who have been affected by enforcement of the ordinance. The suit argues that the ordinance violates the plaintiffs’ rights to procedural and substantive due process, privacy and freedom of association. 

The Rhode Island ACLU today sharply criticized state Attorney General Patrick Lynch for urging Congress to pass a law giving telephone companies retroactive immunity for having illegally shared telephone records with the National Security Agency as part of the government’s “war on terror.” The Congressional bill, if passed, would also pre-empt any state investigations of violations of customer’s privacy rights by the companies. This would kill a pending consumer complaint that the local ACLU filed in May 2006 with the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers against Verizon and AT&T.

Claiming that the program raises “enormous privacy and safety concerns,” the RI ACLU has called on Middletown school officials to halt a planned pilot program in which elementary school children will be tagged with electronic chips to monitor their whereabouts. The program, using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, will track the movements of Aquidneck Elementary School students who take school district buses by placing RFID chips on the children’s backpacks.

The ACLU of Rhode Island today filed an “open records” lawsuit against the Providence Police Department, challenging its refusal to turn over any documents relating to police use of video camera surveillance in public places. The suit, filed in R.I. Superior Court by ACLU volunteer attorney Staci Kolb, seeks a court order requiring release of the records, and the imposition of fines and an award of attorneys fees against the Department. The lawsuit comes exactly one week after the ACLU issued a report that documented widespread non-compliance with the state’s Access to Public Records Act by government agencies, and particularly by police departments.