By Alex Berger, Legislative Assistant, ACLU at 4:59pm
Earlier this month, a high school honors student named Kiera Wilmot was charged with felony discharge of a weapon on school property. Her crime? Creating her own science experiment.
When Kiera mixed several household chemicals together in a plastic bottle, she caused a small explosion in her school's parking lot, hurting no one and causing minimal damage. But now she faces up to ten years in prison and a felony criminal record for a crime she had no intention or desire to commit.
By Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 2:47pm
Fed up with the school-to-prison pipeline? Take action!
Earlier this week, the well-oiled school-to-prison pipeline once again moved swiftly and fiercely to criminalize kids. This time, the pipeline delivered 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot to the open arms of a Florida Assistant State Attorney (ASA).
By Dennis Parker, Director, ACLU Racial Justice Program at 3:27pm
History month celebrations, like those honoring African-Americans and women, are sometimes criticized as being ineffective ways of countering the tendency to marginalize the vital role of blacks and women in shaping American culture. Instead of assuring that the stories of groups who have been excluded become integral parts of the greater national story, critics suggest that history months only succeed in ghettoizing the history of blacks and women, limiting their significance to only one month out of the year and largely ignoring them throughout the rest of the year. That criticism seems well-founded when you look at the way history months are often celebrated with books and slide shows and exhibits taken out of boxes and displayed like holiday decorations, only to be returned to storage for next year.
Today the Supreme Court will hear Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, a case about a South Carolina Indian girl who the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the child must be returned to her Indian father. The child's mother ignored the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, a federal law designed to protect Indian families from "abusive child welfare practices that resulted in the separation of large numbers of Indian children from their families and tribes through adoption or foster case placement" and, as a result, both the tribe and the father were denied their rights under ICWA.
By Seema Sadanandan, Organizer, ACLU of the Nation's Capital at 1:43pm
When Officer David Bailey grabbed a 10-year-old student by the back of his head and slammed it into the school cafeteria table, it is safe to say that student was not free to leave. On that afternoon, Bailey decided that his routine beat on the streets of Southeast D.C. extended into the hallways of Moten Elementary School.
Although Bailey was not a trained school resource officer contracted from the Metropolitan Police Department nor one of the three contract officers assigned to Moten at the time, his presence raised no red flags. Regular visits from the police in D.C. Public Schools had become ubiquitous.
