By Lynda Garcia, Soros Fellow, Criminal Law Reform Project, ACLU at 11:49am
We know that the War on Marijuana unnecessarily drags hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system every year for having marijuana. And, because of a new ACLU report, we know that it is Blacks who are disproportionately arrested– despite the fact that Blacks and whites use marijuana at comparable rates.
But something—or someone—is missing here: Latinos.
By Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 3:09pm
Last week down in Florida, 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian was playing in the water with a friend at the beach when a Miami-Dade police officer approached him to ask what he was doing, misinterpreting their play for a fight. Tremaine walked away from the officers, carrying his new puppy in his arms. After observing his allegedly "dehumanizing stares" and clenched fists, the officer used his ATV to chase Tremaine down and throw him to the ground in a chokehold so intense that the teenager wet himself during the incident. It was his mother who caught part of the incident on camera.
By Ezekiel Edwards, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 10:27am
Marijuana has become the drug of choice for police departments nationwide. According to The War on Marijuana in Black and White, released today, police made over 8 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, and marijuana arrests now account for half of all drug arrests in America. Almost 90% of these are for possession – which means that thousands of people have been unnecessarily ensnared in our criminal justice system just for having marijuana.
By Zeenat N. Hasan, Co-Founder, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), Arizona Chapter at 2:40pm
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona filed a lawsuit today on behalf of the NAACP of Maricopa County and the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF) challenging a state law that relies on harmful racial stereotypes to shame and discriminate against Black women and Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women who decide to end their pregnancies. A version of the following piece by Zeenat N. Hasan, co-founder of the Arizona chapter of NAPAWF originally ran in Arizona Central on April 3, 2013.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision soon in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin to determine if the University of Texas can consider race as one factor, among many, in attempting to create a diverse educational experience for its students. Yet, what critics of affirmative action often gloss over is that our nation's K-12 schools are more segregated by race and class than when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, for many students of all races and classes, college is the first time many students are enriched by a diverse environment.
