News & Commentary

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:

One Year After Disastrous UHIP Rollout, ACLU Is Heading Back to Court To Seek Additional Remedies for Needy Food Stamp Applicants

Five members of Governor Gina Raimondo’s Justice Reinvestment Working Group and six other groups active in criminal justice reform today issued a sharp response to Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s recent attack on the passage of justice reinvestment legislation by the General Assembly.

In a brief filed today, the ACLU of Rhode Island has asked the Superior Court to reject a claim made by the R.I. Department of Corrections (DOC) that inmates serving life sentences at the ACI have no legal right to sue for any violation of their civil rights.  In a related letter sent today to Governor Gina Raimondo, the ACLU of RI also asked her to intervene and call upon the DOC to refrain from taking this position in future inmate civil rights lawsuits.

The ACLU of Rhode Island today filed a federal lawsuit against the Town of Bristol over the police department’s refusal to return to its owners a firearm that the agency seized more than a year ago. The suit, filed by ACLU of RI cooperating attorneys Thomas Lyons and Rhiannon Huffman, is on behalf of two parents who are Bristol residents and inherited their son’s firearm collection after he tragically took his own life.  The suit argues that the Bristol Police Department violated the parents’ constitutional rights by refusing to return the firearm to them.

The ACLU of Rhode Island today announced the dismissal of charges against a group of Narragansett residents, landlords and businesses for violating a Town ordinance that bars more than four unrelated people from living together.  In a 23-page decision issued yesterday, Municipal Court Judge John DeCubellis, Jr. agreed that the ordinance violated plaintiffs’ due process and equal protection rights – as argued earlier this year by ACLU of RI cooperating attorney H. Jefferson Melish in a brief seeking dismissal of the charges.  The judge noted that in 1994, the R.I. Superior Court struck down as unconstitutional a nearly identical Narragansett ordinance and that efforts by the Town to distinguish it were unavailing.

On the heels of the tragic police shooting and subsequent death of an innocent woman in Minneapolis, the ACLU of RI has sent letters to the police chiefs of both Newport and Providence urging them to revise and strengthen their existing body camera policies so that they promote full transparency in policing.

The American Civil Liberties Union announced today that a landmark Rhode Island civil rights case over the rights of incarcerated youth has come to a close. At the behest of the ACLU and the state of Rhode Island, U.S. District Court Chief Judge William Smith dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Rhode Island Training School for Youth in Cranston. The ACLU’s National Prison Project joined the suit in 2001, thirty years after it had been filed to challenge conditions at the facility. At the time the case was filed, teen prisoners did not receive adequate food, schooling, or medical care; the institution provided no mental health care or treatment. “I’m proud to say ‘Case closed,’” said Amy Fettig, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and lead attorney in the case. “Instead of unconstitutional neglect and mistreatment, the Rhode Island Training School for Youth now follows the best practices for working with teens in detention.” In 1973, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit entered into a consent decree that addressed such critical problems as overcrowding; insufficient staffing; meager medical care; a deteriorated physical plant; inadequate meals; scant academic, vocational, and physical education programs; and a lack of mental health care and treatment. A special master was appointed to oversee compliance with the consent decree, and the decree has been amended several times over the years as the institution met some of the terms, most recently in 2014. In his order closing the case, Judge Smith found that the state has substantially complied with the only key elements of the decree that still remained: 1)   Construction of new facilities to meet national standards; 2)   Implementation of a revised policy and procedures manual; 3)   Implementation of a detailed and effective administrative grievance procedure to handle residents’ complaints; and 4)   Establishment of an independent audit and review process by a team of outside experts to ensure substantial compliance with the national best practice standards for juvenile justice created by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. When the lawsuit was filed in 1971, the Rhode Island Training School for Youth was called the Boys’ Training School. Today it holds approximately 80 boys and girls between the ages of 13 and 18. ACLU of Rhode Island volunteer attorney John W. Dineen served as local counsel in the lawsuit, Inmates of the Rhode Island Training School for Youth v. Piccola. More information on the case is available here.

The fallout from the rollout of UHIP, the state’s troubled new computer system, continues to plague Rhode Island’s poorest residents, as the Department of Human Services (DHS) showed virtually no improvement in April in the timely processing of SNAP (food stamp) applications, including for people the Department acknowledges were entitled to emergency relief. That is the upshot of a report sent by DHS this week to the ACLU of Rhode Island (ACLU) and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice (NCLEJ), required as part of a settlement agreement filed earlier this year in the organizations’ challenge to DHS’s failure to timely process SNAP applications.