News & Commentary

Today the open government coalition ACCESS/RI wrote a letter to Town Council President Suzanne McGee Cienki asking her to cancel tonight’s meeting. ACCESS/RI believes the agenda for tonight’s meeting, specifically the item to ratify retroactively “all” the decisions of the Town Manager, violates the OMA requirement for public notice. That agenda item is a case of the Council thumbing its nose at the public’s right to know what action the Council is taking.

Saying that many questions remain unanswered, the ACLU of Rhode Island today issued a five page commentary on the Thursday shooting of Joseph Santos by Providence and RI State Police after a high speed chase, precipitated by the belief that the car had a connection to the theft of a police cruiser earlier that morning by an escaped suspect, Donald Morgan. At this point, no connection between the two incidents has been established.

Where were you a year ago? We were digesting the election results and hoping that the Trump presidency wouldn’t be based on the same hateful ideas that made up much of his campaign.  By February, we had stopped hoping and were hard at work trying to protect Rhode Island’s immigrant communities.  And that was just the beginning of what has been a challenging year for our founding principles.  We have been VERY busy – both challenging federal threats to our rights, and working to safeguard and expand justice in the Ocean State in response to those threats. Here’s a look at a sample month-by-month snippet of what we have been up to in resisting the Trump anti-civil rights agenda:

Steven Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island, today issued the following statement in response to U.S. District Judge William Smith’s  appointment of retired attorney Deming Sherman as a special master to oversee the resolution of the State’s ongoing problems with UHIP:

The ACLU of Rhode Island today sued the RI State Police (RISP) for abusing their power by retaliating against Marissa Lacoste, 25, a Warwick resident who declined to serve as an informant for the agency in an ongoing criminal investigation. Specifically, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court by ACLU of RI cooperating attorney James W. Musgrave, RISP relied on a dubious state law to bar Lacoste from continuing to work as a cocktail waitress at Twin River Casino in Lincoln when she bowed out of assisting RISP as an informant.

In response to the state’s unmitigated failure to comply with a court order issued in February designed to ensure the timely provision of food stamp assistance to needy families, U.S. District Judge William Smith today scheduled a public court hearing on Thursday in which he anticipates he will “proceed with appointment of a special master” to oversee a plan of action that will compel the state’s compliance with that order.

Yesterday a federal court ordered the release of information highlighting that Kris Kobach - the head of President Trump’s “Commission on Election Integrity,” - is dead set on undermining voting rights.  Unfortunately, attempts to make voting harder are also happening locally.

The ACLU of Rhode Island issued the following statement in response to the State's acknowledgement today about thousands of unprocessed applications submitted through the UHIP program:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today sued the Johnston Police Department on behalf of retired Detective James Brady, an 18-year veteran of the force, for violating his First Amendment rights. In his role as union president of Local #307 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers (IBPO), Brady spoke to news media about a matter of public concern and was subsequently disciplined by the Department.  The suit filed today argues that Johnston Police Chief Richard Tamburini violated Brady’s free speech rights by suspending him without pay for two days for his comments, and that the policies under which Brady was disciplined are unconstitutionally vague.