This week, Wednesday is a big day for immigrants' rights advocates: The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Arizona v. United States, the Justice Department's challenge to S.B. 1070, Arizona's racial profiling law. The ACLU will be participating in two briefings today and tomorrow, and will be attending the argument.
By Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 10:58am
Today the Supreme Court was asked if federal officials responsible for the torture of an American citizen on American soil may be sued for damages under the Constitution.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:05pm
On Monday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision protecting privacy in the digital age. In U.S. v. Jones, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the police and FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when they attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones’s car and tracked his movements for 28 days. While the case turned on the fact that the government physically placed a GPS device on Mr. Jones’s car, the implications are far broader. A majority of the justices acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives.
The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (FSA) is actually only kind of fair. The passage of the 2010 law, which reduced the crack to powder mandatory minimum ratio in federal cocaine sentences from 100:1 to 18:1, was a significant step in the direction of fairness. While we applaud this change, we also look forward to the day when Congress adopts the actually fair ratio of 1:1. In the meantime, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari on two FSA cases, Hill v. United States and Dorsey v. United States, both out of the Seventh Circuit. In these cases, the Court will decide whether people whose offense predates the enactment of the FSA but who were sentenced afterwards should be sentenced based on the old 100:1 ratio or the new 18:1 ratio. If the Court rules the wrong way, a sizeable class of people will be excluded from Congress’ attempt to restore fairness and racial neutrality to federal cocaine sentencing, and the kind-of-Fair Sentencing Act will become even less fair.
By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 4:16pm
Yesterday at the Supreme Court, a New Orleans prosecutor defended the conviction of a man despite the admitted failure of her office to turn over evidence they were required to provide to his defense team. This fraudulently obtained conviction was then used to help send Juan Smith to death row. The prosecutorial misconduct was so severe — and the shameful history of New Orleans prosecutors so blatant — that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan asked the hapless prosecutor: “Did your office ever consider just confessing error in this case?”
The theme this week was "without": combating the spread of AIDS without actual tools and information to combat the spread of AIDS, searches without warrants, protections for business without protections for everybody else, government bureaucracy without privacy or security, accessing medical marijuana without federal government interference, sentencing without (or at least with a lot less) unfairness. That last one is good, the rest not so much....
The Supreme Court ended the 2010 term today, delivering the much-anticipated decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, a case that challenged California's ban of the sale of violent video games to minors. In a 7-2 decision, the Court found the state's law violated the First Amendment. The Court called California's attempt to put video games in a new category not protected by the First Amendment "unpersuasive."
