News & Commentary

Saying that the situation created “a troubling impression of retaliatory motivation,” the ACLU of Rhode Island and the R.I. Disability Law Center have called on the Barrington School Committee to issue a high school diploma to Molly Coffey, the Barrington High School senior whose plight led to the General Assembly’s passage of a law establishing a moratorium on the state’s “high stakes testing” requirement for graduation.

Five local organizations dedicated to open government have raised concerns that rules proposed by the Rhode Island Judiciary to implement a new electronic filing system for court documents could lead to increased secrecy and limited access to important court records by the public.

ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown released the following the statement on the Rhode Island Traffic Stop Statistics Data Collection Study. The report includes data for all local police departments and State Police. It is available here.

Ruling in an ACLU lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge William Smith struck down a state law that makes it a crime to circulate anonymous political literature, including unsigned newspaper editorials. The ACLU of Rhode Island sued over the legality of the statute earlier this year to halt the Town of Smithfield’s stated plans to enforce it. The statute, which carries a potential one-year prison sentence, bars the distribution of any anonymous political literature that relates to ballot questions or that criticizes a political candidate’s “personal character or political action.”

This op-ed by ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown appeared in The Providence Journal Friday, October 3, 2014.

The state Division of Motor Vehicles is sharing personal information about innocent Rhode Islanders with a growing federal anti-terrorism database, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island charged today. The ACLU has called on the DMV to stop sharing the data and to publicly justify its decision to participate in the first place.

ACLU of Rhode Island and the Brown University Chapter of the ACLU commended Brown University President Christina Paxson’s response to the reports on the incident surrounding former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s planned lecture on the Brown Campus last year. ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown issued the following statement: “The ACLU commends President Paxson’s clear and thoughtful response to the civil liberties and civil rights issues raised by last year’s incident. We cannot do better than echo her succinct observation that ‘we do not need to choose between supporting freedom of expression or racial equality. Protecting freedom of expression and furthering human rights are mutually reinforcing.’ “University campuses must be a haven for the expression of unpopular viewpoints if they are to fulfill their basic mission.  As President Paxson noted: ‘If we do not protect the expression of all ideas, valuable ones may not be heard.’ By protecting freedom of expression, seeking to promote diversity of viewpoints, and promoting a more diverse faculty and student body, Brown University will be upholding the best traditions of academic freedom and inclusion.”

Ten years after Rhode Island law began requiring police departments to post online their police complaint forms and procedures, some departments are still not in compliance with some of the law’s basic requirements, a report issued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island has found. The requirement, contained in the Racial Profiling Prevention Act of 2004, was designed to make it easier for victims of police misconduct to file complaints with departments. Over the years, some police officials have cited the rarity of complaints they receive to minimize claims about the prevalence of racial profiling or other misconduct.