News & Commentary

UPDATE: 8/10/18 Within a day after the ACLU's lawsuit was filed, the school provided the ACLU the requested documents that formed the basis for the complaint. As a result, the ACLU has dismissed the lawsuit.

The ACLU of RI, joined by three media organizations, today submitted a “friend of the court” brief in support of a federal lawsuit filed by the Providence Journal seeking a ruling on the constitutionality of Superior Court Associate Justice Netti Vogel’s controversial orders in April that initially blocked the release of the juror list, and barred members of the public from contacting the jurors, in a completed, high-profile murder case.

The 2018 Legislative Session seemed like it should be the year of #MeToo, but when the General Assembly adjourned at the end of June with an exhausting Saturday session (that almost went into Sunday) they failed to approve legislation ensuring equal pay for equal work, or any of the bills that emerged from a commission tasked with helping address sex harassment in the workplace.

Four organizations have submitted a “friend of the court” brief in the RI Supreme Court in support of Governor Gina Raimondo’s appeal for the release of the grand jury records in the 38 Studios proceedings.  The organizations are the ACLU of RI, the RI Press Association, the New England First Amendment Coalition and Common Cause RI. The brief, submitted by ACLU cooperating attorneys and RWU Law School professors Jared A. Goldstein and Andrew Horwitz, argues that, in the case of 38 Studios, “the fundamental right of the people to know about the operations of their government” far outweighs any standards generally barring disclosure of grand jury proceedings.

ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown issued the following statement today in response to the grand jury finding that police officers and State troopers acted lawfully in the fatal shooting of Joseph Santos last November:

If we’ve learned anything over the years it should be that bills cobbled together and rushed through for passage NEVER seem to have anything good come of them.  But alas, this scenario played out yesterday when the House of Representatives voted – with bipartisan support no less, including Rhode Island’s own Congressman Jim Langevin – to potentially expand the government’s ability to spy on us. 

The ACLU of Rhode Island today filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that participants in a Medicaid program run by the state are not being given proper notice before being kicked off the program, leading to a loss of income that the suit says puts low-income residents “at risk of losing their homes and their utilities and deprives them of funds needed for their daily living expenses, including food.” The suit, against the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), ties the improper notice to the state’s infamous UHIP computer system, the subject of another pending ACLU suit regarding food stamp benefit delays.

Here’s a look at the top issues – including some big victories and losses – of 2017:

In a ruling that the ACLU of Rhode Island called a blow to an open judicial process, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit today held, by a 2-1 vote, that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) can keep secret thousands of pages of documents it had submitted in a major prescription drug-dealing criminal trial. At the same time, the plaintiff in the case, local journalist Philip Eil, said the suit still had a positive effect, prompting the DEA to release thousands of other documents it would not have otherwise disclosed in the absence of the lawsuit.