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.

08/13/2012
Overincarceration

Extreme Sentencing

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 6:12pm

Snatching a purse off the arm of an elderly woman is one of the nastier offenses I can think of – the kind of thing that might make you shake your head and say to yourself “I hope whoever did that gets what’s coming to him.” And then you think for a second about just what he ought to have coming to him: community service, maybe – or even a night in jail. Stealing from an old lady is pretty mean, after all, and you’d want whoever did it to learn a lesson.

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03/20/2012
Drug-Testing Welfare Recipients

Editorial: Drug-Testing Welfare Applicants Nets Little

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 4:00pm

An editorial in yesterday's USA Today takes a hard look at the recent push to drug-test applicants for public assistance across the country. The verdict? "Until states can come up with a smarter way to ferret out the abusers while protecting children, the testing craze will be just another program that appeals to stereotypes in hard economic times while producing little value in the real world."

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03/21/2011
FISA Amendments Act

VICTORY! Court Says Plaintiffs Can Challenge Bush Wiretapping Law

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 12:47pm

In a huge victory for privacy and the rule of law, a federal appeals court today reinstated our landmark lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), a statute that gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and e-mail communications with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, witnesses, experts, foreign government officials and victims of human rights abuses located outside the United States.

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05/28/2008

Knee-Jerk Redaction?

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 12:27pm

After CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, waterboarded detainees, the agency could no longer cling to its last excuses for covering up the use of the very word “waterboarding” in CIA records. As a result, yesterday we obtained several heavily redacted documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.

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08/15/2011
Overincarceration

Safety in Numbers?

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:26pm

In the last decade, New York drastically reduced its prison population and at the same time experienced a huge drop in crime. Indiana, on the other hand, drastically increased its prison population — and consequently the burden to taxpayers — while seeing a much smaller drop in crime than the national average.

A new infographic out from the ACLU today shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, increasing a state’s prison population isn’t necessarily a good way to make that state safer.

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05/18/2011

Sentencing Children to Die in Prison

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 1:23pm

One year ago this week, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that sentencing youth who have committed non-homicide offenses to life in prison without some meaningful opportunity for review of that sentence is unconstitutional. Although the ruling does not guarantee that juvenile offenders will eventually be released, it requires that they be provided with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before during their lifetime. The ruling in the case, Graham v. Florida, was an important step in the right direction. It recognized that juvenile offenders are fundamentally different from their adult counterparts, that they have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation, and that they should not, therefore, be punished with the harshest sentence that can be imposed on adults.

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03/08/2012
Private Prisons

Stop Incarceration for Profit in Your State

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 3:28pm

A private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, wants to buy your state's prisons and keep them full. Help us stop them.

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11/05/2012
U.S. Death Penalty

Replace the Death Penalty in California

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 2:55pm

Imagine for a minute that all the public busses in California sat dormant in a parking lot, never to run again. Imagine that the public schools sent all the kids home for good. Imagine also that state’s hospitals shuttered their doors and turned the ill away. Now imagine that, despite a total shutdown of the transportation, education and health care systems, California taxpayers still paid millions every year to fund these non-functioning systems.

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04/18/2012
Medical Marijuana

Medical Marijuana Patient Fired by Wal-Mart Deserves His Day in Court

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 5:07pm

Some readers may recall the story of Joseph Casias, the model employee who was fired from his job at Wal-Mart for using medical marijuana in accordance with state law. The ACLU was in court today to argue that an appeals court should reinstate a lawsuit we filed on Casias' behalf, charging Wal-Mart and the manager of its Battle Creek, Mich., store with wrongfully firing him.

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10/11/2011
Florida

Trading Privacy for Benefits

By Rachel Myers, ACLU at 12:38pm

The New York Times has this story about the dramatic increase in the number of states considering legislation that would mandate drug testing for poor people who rely on public assistance. The ACLU of Florida filed a lawsuit in September challenging Florida’s law — one of the most egregious we’ve seen — requiring applicants for cash assistance to submit to a drug test, at their own cost, in order to qualify for benefits. As we’ve said before, laws like Florida’s are costly, ineffective and unconstitutional.

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