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Although we supported this legislation, we pointed out the absurdity that a student who could bring and administer sunscreen under this bill still wouldn’t be able to utilize an ointment to treat a sunburn without this discretionary permission.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island has asked a federal court to order the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to release thousands of pages of documents in support of its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of local journalist Philip Eil (left, photo by Natalja Kent), who has been stymied for years in his effort to obtain from the DEA evidence disclosed at a major prescription drug-dealing trial. In its motion for summary judgment filed yesterday, the ACLU called for the release of  “the wrongfully withheld documents post haste.”

In the near-final chapter of a long-running ACLU “open records” lawsuit against the Providence Police Department, the R.I. Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the City of Providence cannot charge the community group DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) for the costs of providing copies of internal police misconduct reports. The Court has also ordered the City to pay the ACLU’s volunteer lawyers their attorneys’ fees dating back to the ACLU’s inception of the litigation in 1995.

By Johanna Kaiser, communications & development associate