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.

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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09/29/2011
Wal-Mart

Medical Marijuana: A Cure, Not a Crime

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 10:40am

Joseph Casias has battled sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor for more than a decade. His condition has required extensive treatment and chemotherapy, interferes with his ability to speak, and is a source of severe and daily pain. The pain relief medicine prescribed by Joseph's oncologist helped a little, but he continued to experience constant pain as well as nausea, a side effect of the medication.

Luckily, Joseph lives in Michigan, where a voter-enacted statute allows the use of marijuana to treat certain severe medical conditions like his. Joseph's oncologist recommended that he try marijuana in accordance with the state law; he did, and immediately found it very helpful to treat his condition.

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08/22/2011
Pelican Bay State Prison

"Solitary Confinement Should be a Last Resort"

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 12:39pm

That is the title of this excellent editorial in the Washington Post, which takes on the issue of solitary confinement recently brought into the national spotlight by the hunger striking prisoners in California's Pelican Bay State Prison and other facilities across the state.

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08/08/2011

Ohio and the Death Penalty

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 5:18pm

Check out this great editorial the New York Times ran over the weekend, highlighting the longstanding problems with Ohio’s death penalty and calling for an end the practice throughout the country:

Governor Kasich should instead listen to Ohio’s senior Supreme Court justice, Paul Pfeifer, who helped write the state’s death-penalty law as a legislator and has called on Ohio to abolish what he calls the “death lottery.” It is time for every state with the penalty on the books to outlaw this barbaric punishment.

We've blogged about problems with the death penalty in Ohio before.

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06/30/2011
War on Drugs

Just Say "No" to the War on Drugs

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:21pm

June 2011 marked the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs" — a war that has cost roughly a trillion dollars, has produced little to no effect on the supply of or demand for drugs in the United States, and has contributed to making America the world's largest incarcerator. Throughout the month, we’ve run daily posts about the drug war, its victims and what needs to be done to restore fairness and create effective policy.

Today, we got some encouraging news: the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to retroactively apply the new Fair Sentencing Act guidelines to individuals sentenced before the law was enacted. This decision will help ensure that over 12,000 people — 85 percent of whom are African-Americans — will have the opportunity to have their sentences for crack cocaine offenses reviewed by a federal judge and possibly reduced.

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06/28/2011
California

The High Price of Habitual Offender Laws

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 4:07pm

Has North Carolina taken one step forward but another one back in trying to solve the state's prison population issues? The recently passed Justice Reinvestment Act looks to make some positive strides in the area of criminal justice reform, particularly by providing alternatives to prison for many drug possession offenses. But another new law that stiffens habitual offender laws is disturbingly reminiscent of other states' tough habitual offender laws — such as California's infamous "three strikes" law that, rather than reducing recidivism, has led to a well-publicized overcrowding problem in that state's prisons.

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05/25/2011
Overincarceration

Plata Decision: Good for the Constitution, Communities and Taxpayer Wallets

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 4:36pm

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state of California to reduce its prison population in order to alleviate extreme overcrowding that endangers the health and safety of the state's prisoners and prison staff. The decision in Brown v. Plata affirms a lower court ruling in two long-running cases in which the medical and mental health care provided in California's prisons was found to be so deficient that it endangers the lives of prisoners and violates the U.S. Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case before the Supreme Court.

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04/05/2011
BRCA

ACLU Lens: Appeals Court Hears Case Challenging Patents on Breast Cancer Genes

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 5:43pm

A crowd of scientists, medical professionals and legal scholars packed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday to hear an appeal in our lawsuit challenging the patents on two human genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

The ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation brought a lawsuit in May 2009 against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on the genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. The lawsuit charges that the patents restrict both scientific research and patients' access to medical care, and that patents on human genes are illegal because genes are "products of nature." The groups brought the case on behalf of breast cancer and women's health groups, individual women, geneticists and scientific associations representing approximately 150,000 researchers, pathologists and laboratory professionals.

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01/10/2011

Signed, Unsealed and Stay Tuned

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 2:14pm

Over the weekend, the Internet was buzzing with the revelation that the government had obtained a court order requiring Twitter to provide information about some of its subscribers who are associated with WikiLeaks. The court order was made public only after Twitter successfully took action to unseal it and notified its clients whose records were at stake.

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08/10/2010

"Doe" No Mo'!

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 1:39pm

Well, we can finally say it: John Doe is Nicholas Merrill! For the first time since the FBI served him with a national security letter (NSL) and placed him under gag more than six years ago, Nick can finally speak out about his experiences as the first person to ever bring a challenge against NSLs.

Please note that by playing this clip You Tube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see You Tube's privacy statement on their website and Google's privacy statement on theirs to learn more. To view the ACLU's privacy statement, click here.
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