News & Commentary

In a brief filed in the R.I. Supreme Court today, the ACLU of Rhode Island is challenging the Providence Police Department’s efforts to avoid any liability for its admitted contemptuous behavior for almost two years in failing to comply with both the state’s racial profiling law and court orders that had found the Police Department in contempt for non-compliance with that law.

The ACLU of R.I. today filed a federal lawsuit challenging the life-sized nativity scene  and menorah in front of Cranston City Hall, as well as the policy that Mayor Stephen Laffey recently implemented to authorize those displays. The suit, filed by ACLU volunteer attorneys Miriam Weizenbaum and Amato DeLuca on behalf of life-long Cranston resident Grace C. Osediacz, argues that both the display and the policy violate the First Amendment.

Calling the decision “deeply disappointing,” the ACLU announced that U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lisi had today denied the organization’s request to submit a friend of the court brief to address the issue of imposing sanctions on the three attorneys in the Cornel Young, Jr. civil rights case. They are facing sanctions for allegedly misrepresenting the judge’s position in court papers.

In a case that raised potentially far-reaching free speech issues for state residents, the ACLU hailed the dismissal today of criminal charges against Little Compton resident William Bullivant at a hearing before R.I. Superior Court Judge Melanie Wilk Thunberg. ACLU volunteer attorneys Charles Levesque and Nicholas Trott Long represented Bullivant at the hearing.

ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown issued the following statement today in response to City of Providence’s release of an “action plan” to address racial profiling:

The ACLU of Rhode Island is seeking to have the Providence Police Department held in contempt of court for its continued failure to comply with the state’s racial profiling law and with court orders that had previously found the Police Department in contempt for non-compliance with that law. Even as the City continues its appeal of that initial contempt finding, the ACLU has today asked the R.I. Supreme Court to return the case to Superior Court for a further contempt hearing.

Relying on recently-released statistics showing that Providence Police Department’s compliance with the Traffic Stops Statistics Act in May, 2003 was the lowest than at any time since the City was held in contempt of court last October for violating that Act, the ACLU has called on the City to continue to collect traffic stops data on a voluntary basis for the indefinite future. Only in this way, the ACLU said in a three-page letter to Mayor David Cicilline, can the City seek to stem the problem of racial profiling in the City, which a top police official has acknowledged is occurring. Pursuant to a court order issued last year in response to the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the City’s non-compliance with the Act, traffic stops data collection continued through July, but has since ceased.

The ACLU of Rhode Island today released a report that both shows that most public libraries in the state oppose the use of censoring software for their computers with Internet access, and that calls upon libraries to take steps to minimize the impact of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision which will now require most of them to nonetheless install so-called “blocking software.”

The ACLU of Rhode Island today filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an unprecedented state law passed by the General Assembly last month that gave the Town of North Smithfield a one-time exemption from the state’s major law banning employment discrimination. The suit was filed on behalf of an Hispanic female applicant, Christine Melendez, who is barred from obtaining any position with the newly-created North Smithfield Fire Department because of the law. Instead, the town has voted to hire 21 white males who currently work for the town’s private fire and rescue service. Last week, the Town, which has no fire department of its own, took formal action to acquire the private fire and rescue service that has been serving North Smithfield. In doing so, the Town voted to hire en masse the service’s all white and all male firefighting force. Before taking this action, the Town sought and obtained an exemption from the state’s Fair Employment Practices Act (FEPA), the state law prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of race, gender and age. The exemption, granted by the General Assembly, bars any individual from filing an employment discrimination claim under FEPA for the Town’s mass hiring. However, the law did not – and legally could not – exempt the Town from federal anti-discrimination statutes.