Blog of Rights
Rachel
Myers

Rachel Myers is a senior communications strategist at the ACLU focusing on criminal justice issues. She worked previously at the ACLU of Maine and the Portland (ME) Education Partnership, where she trained teachers, students and community organizations to use service learning in the public schools. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin.

01/17/2012
Solitary Confinement

Washington Post Editorializes on Solitary Confinement in Virginia

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:06pm

The Washington Post had this important editorial on the overuse of solitary confinement in Virginia prison. The Post calls on Virginia to follow in the footsteps of other states that have moved in the right direction and begun to reduce their reliance on solitary confinement.

As we wrote last week, Department of Corrections (DOC) officials laud 23-hour-a-day lockdown as a necessary measure for handling the “worst of the worst.” Unfortunately, this supposed “worst of the worst” includes the mentally ill — the Virginia DOC admits that almost 30% of those in solitary in Red Onion State Prison have been diagnosed as mentally ill. Even worse, prisoners are sometimes kept in solitary for years, regardless of their mental health status.

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01/13/2012
Medical Marijuana

Arizona Governor Will Implement Medical Marijuana Law

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 5:02pm

Gov. Brewer had previously challenged the law in court, arguing that state officials fear federal prosecution for implementing the law. Her case was dismissed earlier this week.

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01/10/2012

Bowing to ACLU Lawsuit, South Carolina Jail Lifts Book Ban

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 4:50pm

In a settlement reached today, officials at a South Carolina jail agreed to stop barring prisoners from accessing books, magazines, newspapers and other periodicals.

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01/05/2012
Arizona

Arizona Medical Marijuana Law Survives Attack by Arizona Governor

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 12:37pm

A federal judge granted the ACLU's request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer seeking to strike down her own state's voter-approved medical marijuana law.

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12/27/2011

L.A. Times Calls for Jails Investigation to Turn Up the Heat

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 1:46pm

An editorial in the L.A. Times today called on the new seven-member commission charged with investigating Los Angeles County's jails to put real pressure on Sherriff Lee Baca to improve conditions in the troubled facilities. Facing mounting pressure from the media and public, in October Sherriff Baca announced the formation of the commission to study serious allegations of brutality against inmates — including deputy-on-inmate assaults, deputy-instigated inmate-on-inmate assaults and the use of excessive force — detailed in a recent ACLU report.

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12/22/2011

The Criminal Justice Year in Review - 2011

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:21pm

As 2011 comes to end, we’re taking a look back at the year in criminal justice. Over the next few days, we’ll run a series of blog posts on the developments, good and bad, that have shaped our justice system – from overincarceration and sentencing policy to the treatment of prisoners and capital punishment. Read the series here.

In reflecting on the last year in the criminal justice world, it’s easy to recall the bad – even sometimes devastating – milestones. Across the nation, we continued to see reliance on overincarceration and the private prison industry. The U.S. Senate failed to adopt (by 3 votes) an important amendment that would have created a bipartisan commission to study our criminal justice system and suggest reforms. In Georgia, Troy Davis was executed despite overwhelming doubt about his guilt, and in North Carolina the legislature voted to repeal the historic Racial Justice Act (which, thankfully, has been saved for now by Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of that shameful vote). It’s true – the year was not without its grave injustices. But we can’t ignore the many good things that happened, either. As we head into 2012, let’s take a moment to celebrate the successes.

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12/14/2011
Racial Justice Act

North Carolina Governor Vetoes Repeal of Historic Racial Justice Act

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 4:38pm

North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue today courageously vetoed a bill to repeal that state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), an historic 2009 state law enacted to ensure that death sentences handed down in the state are not the result of racial bias in the trial and jury selection process.

Last month the North Carolina legislature voted to repeal RJA, which allows death row inmates to present statistics showing that race was a factor at the time of their trial. If an inmate was able to show that, his or her death sentence would be converted to life in prison without parole.

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11/04/2011
Alabama

New Chance for Justice in Alabama

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 10:00am

This week we got the welcome news that the state of Alabama will not appeal a ruling ordering a new trial for ACLU client Montez Spradley, who was sentenced to death despite inadequate and very weak evidence, after his trial judge rejected the jury’s 10-2 vote for a life sentence .

As we’ve written before, Spradley, a young African-American man, has always vigorously maintained his innocence in the 2004 murder of a 58-year-old white grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. The prosecution's case against Spradley was alarmingly thin and riddled with inconsistencies, and in ordering a new trial the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found that much of it was "improperly admitted."

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10/19/2011
Prosecutorial Misconduct

Execution Based On Lies

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:50pm

Manuel Velez was sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of a 1-year-old boy based on the false testimony of his live-in girlfriend and mother of the child. The woman, Acela Moreno, failed to admit she had separately pleaded guilty to inflicting her son with head injuries the day he died. Medical experts made clear these injuries were consistent with those that led to the child's death. At Velez's trial, Moreno testified she pleaded guilty not to committing violence against the child but rather to having failed to alert authorities that Velez had allegedly been hurting the child.

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10/13/2011
Private Prisons

The Problem With Private Prisons

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:06pm

Check out this great opinion piece at CNBC.com by David Shapiro of the ACLU National Prison Project about the problems with the for-profit, private prison industry.

Says David:

Now is the time for serious criminal justice reform, not privatization schemes. The private prison industry feeds off the mass incarceration problem and cannot be part of the solution. The only real way to cut prison spending is to cut the number of people we keep in prison.

David is the author of a forthcoming, comprehensive report on private prisons. The ACLU’s work on the issue will be featured in a CNBC documentary on October 18.

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