Blog of Rights
Will
Matthews

Will Matthews is the senior communications officer at the ACLU of Northern California, where he leads the strategic communications component of a statewide ACLU campaign to reform California’s criminal justice system. Previously he was the senior media relations associate at the ACLU’s national office in New York, where he primarily worked on the ACLU’s campaign to reduce over-incarceration. A graduate of Chapman University in Orange, Calif, and the recipient of the Master of Divinity degree from Vanderbilt University, Matthews formerly was an award-winning investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.

05/02/2008

North Carolina Man Exonerated After 14 Years on Death Row

By Will Matthews, ACLU of Northern California at 1:51pm

The American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project won a huge victory today when a North Carolina court dropped all charges against a man who spent 14 years on death row and freed him from prison.

As stunning as it might sound that an innocent man in this country could wrongfully sit on death row for more than a decade, what is even more stunning is the fact that stories like Jones' are almost becoming commonplace. Jones is the fifth innocent death row inmate to be exonerated and freed in just the past 11 months in the United States. And Jones is the third man on North Carolina's death row to be freed since December.

While last month's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees upholding the three drug lethal injection method of capital punishment used in Kentucky and other states was disappointing, Jones' exoneration today illuminates that the ruling doesn't even come close to getting at the heart of all that ails our nation's death penalty system. If our society cannot ensure that the innocent are protected from conviction and wrongful execution, the death penalty is a gamble we can't afford to make, and states should think twice before resuming executions in Baze's wake.

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02/26/2008

Married in Bucks County: Are you Really?

By Will Matthews, ACLU of Northern California at 8:38pm

Jason and Jennifer O’Neill were married in Bucks County, Penn. in 2005, and for over two years they experienced all of the typical joys and challenges that invariably come during a young couple’s first years of matrimony.

But then, without warning, trouble unlike anything they could have ever anticipated arrived in their mailbox and threatened to shatter the life they were well on their way to building together.

The Bucks County Register of Wills had sent a letter informing the O’Neills that they might not really be married after all.

Say what?

They had put on a wedding. They have the pictures to prove it. They had filed their marriage license with the register of wills. They have a copy of it to prove that.

The problem? A shockingly broad and befuddling declaration by a York County judge stating that marriages are invalid if presided over by a minister who does not regularly serve a church or preach in a physical house of worship. That and a series of decisions by registers of wills across the state of Pennsylvania to issue letters to couples like the O’Neills informing them they should consider getting re-married because they might not be legally hitched. (you can see the actual letter the O'Neill's received in the mail on page 17 of this complaint.)

The O’Neill’s 2005 marriage ceremony was officiated by Jason’s uncle, a minister of the Universal Life Church whose primary vocation is not full-time ministry. Jason and Jennifer grew up in different religious traditions and chose Jason’s uncle to perform their wedding because they didn’t want to prioritize one of those traditions over the other. As a result, said Barbara G. Reilly, the Bucks County, Penn. register of wills, the couple might want to think about getting married again.

The O’Neills decided not to do so.

They don’t believe the state has any business invalidating marriages just because it doesn’t like the kind of ministers who officiated them. And re-marrying could be construed as a tacit admission that they hadn’t ever been married in the first place – potentially jeopardizing more then two years worth of benefits they had enjoyed as a married couple, from health insurance to tax benefits.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania has filed lawsuits on behalf of the O’Neills and two other couples who were married by ministers who were not at the time regularly serving a church or preaching in a physical house of worship. The aim is to get an appellate court ruling that their marriages are in fact valid - a ruling that would invalidate the York County judicial declaration.

But until then, if you live in Pennsylvania, keep a careful eye on your mail. You just never know when the state might try to ruin your marriage.

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02/14/2008

Love Is Apparently Not All You Need

By Will Matthews, ACLU of Northern California at 5:08pm

Peter Goldberger and Anna Durbin have been married for 30 years and have raised three children.

But on this Valentine's Day, when the Ardmore, Pa. couple's only concern should be celebrating three decades of unyielding devotion to each other, Peter and Anna will instead be worrying about whether the state of Pennsylvania considers their marriage to be legally valid.

In affirming the wishes of another couple to have their marriage annulled last September, York County Judge Maria Musti Cook delivered a sweepingly broad ruling that said marriages are invalid if presided over by a minister who does not regularly serve a church or preach in a physical house of worship.

As a result, Anna and Peter's marriage, officiated by an ordained Catholic priest who at the time was clerking for a United States District Court Judge, might well be in jeopardy.

Thousands of other Pennsylvania marriages might be in danger as well.

So today, in true Valentine's Day spirit, the ACLU filed three lawsuits in an effort to protect marriage in Pennsylvania. The lawsuits were filed on behalf of Goldberger and Durbin, as well as two other Pennsylvania couples, both of whose marriages were officiated by ministers of the Universal Life Church and who gained their ordained status over the internet.

The issue at hand, as ACLU of Pennsylvania staff attorney Mary Catherine Roper has put it in conversations with reporters today, is that the state has no business saying that one kind of minister is better than another.

"The state has no business invalidating marriages just because it doesn't like the kind of minister who officiated them," Roper said.

Cupid himself couldn't have said it any better.

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12/19/2007

Warehousing the Mentally Ill

By Will Matthews, ACLU of Northern California at 4:54pm

Ensuring proper care for incarcerated people with mental illness has increasingly become a hot button issue across the country. From Maine to Nevada and in between, state legislatures and department of corrections officials have been forced in recent months to grapple with the fact that the care provided to mentally ill prisoners has been substandard at best and life-threatening at worst.

But as Libby Lewis' story this morning for National Public Radio documents, one of the worst places to be caught up in the correctional system as a person with mental illness is the U.S. Virgin Islands, an American territory that is governed by the same constitutional principles that the rest of the United States seeks to abide by.

A quick glance at a medical report detailing the standard of care provided to mentally ill prisoners at the Criminal Justice Complex in the Virgin Islands reveals the sickening reality faced by inmates there. Lewis focuses on the story of Jonathan Ramos, who suffers from chronic schizophrenia. Ramos has been imprisoned for more than five years now after stealing a bicycle from a local Wal-Mart because there is no mental health facility in the Virgin Islands to treat him. But Ramos is only one of a handful of inmates with mental illness who continue to be victimized by a woeful criminal justice system and governmental officials who seemingly don't care.

Eric Balaban, an attorney with the ACLU's National Prison Project, has asked a federal judge to levy fines against officials in the Virgin Islands to force them to comply with two years worth of court orders and move the five other mentally ill prisoners in the Virgin Islands to a hospital that can treat them properly.

People like Ramos who are in desperate need of proper treatment and care deserve better than to have to rot away in prison, tossed aside and forgotten about, while their urgent mental health needs go unattended to. Allowing our nation's prison system to turn into de-facto warehouses for the mentally ill not only does people like Ramos a grave injustice, but it also does an injustice to already overburdened and overpopulated prisons. Victory in this case in the Virgin Islands would send a clear message to the rest of the country about the urgent need for systemic reform and overhaul.

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12/16/2007

Wilson County Schools Are Well Worth a Mass

By Will Matthews, ACLU of Northern California at 4:02pm

In an op-ed published in The New York Times last week, Roger Cohen relates the insight of a former French king who, surveying the destruction that rained down upon 16th-century Europe as a result of pre-Enlightenment religious fervor, said, "Paris is well worth a Mass."

Folks in Wilson County, Tennessee would be wise to heed this monarch's words.

Check out the chatter tagged to Wednesday's front-page story about the ACLU of Tennessee's lawsuit challenging the ongoing practice by Wilson County Schools' officials of promoting and endorsing specific religious beliefs. While the chatter certainly pales in comparison to the smoldering cathedrals that dotted the European landscape in the wake of Reformation-era violence, the culture war being played out on The Tennessean's website is indicative of the very same ill: religion and the state becoming too enmeshed with each other.

In this particular case, there are teachers who are leading prayer and religious song during class time.

And a group of self-named "Praying Parents" who pray together on campus as students arrive for the school day and then deliver personalized notes inside classrooms informing individual students and teachers that they have been prayed for.

And so now, instead of being focused on the altruistic task of improving public education, some folks in Wilson County are insisting on enlisting public schools to promote their particular religious views. They simply don't understand why public school officials - rather than individual parents and families - are barred from deciding what sort of religious education the children of Wilson County receive.

The answer is simple: the Constitution of the United States says they can't - and with good reason. Religious freedom is alive and well in America precisely because the government - and especially our public schools - don't take sides in matters of faith.

Our friends at the Alliance Defense Fund - one of a slew of fundamentalist Christian law firms that have popped up in the past couple of decades who purport to defend religious freedom but who in actuality promote freedom for one small niche of Christians at the expense of all other religious and non-religious Americans - will scream until they're hoarse that if the ACLU wins its lawsuit in Tennessee that it will have a chilling and precedent-setting effect on the rights of Christians to freely express their religious beliefs.

But all they are really doing is fueling the fire of the culture wars they concoct, feed upon and use to arouse good folks like those who have chimed in on the Tennessean's website. There in fact will be little precedent set by an ACLU victory. Indeed, the Constitutional principles that are at stake in this case have been clearly communicated in the Bill of Rights for over 200 years: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

By requiring that teachers not promote explicitly religious beliefs in public school classrooms and barring schools from giving certain individuals and faiths preferential use of school resources, the ACLU will in no way be limiting people's constitutional right to be religious. Instead, by ensuring that the government stays out of deciding which religions to promote, the ACLU will be making sure that religious liberty continues to be a hallmark of our democracy.

And instead of being a battle field for wars rooted in religious fervor, Wilson County Schools can once again resume the essential task of providing a quality public education to its students.

Echoing the words of the king from a generation long since passed, Cohen argued in his New York Times op-ed that Washington is well worth a Mass. So too are the Wilson County Schools.

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