Nadine Strossen Talks Sex and Civil Liberties

In 2023, the State of Colorado admitted to the public that a state DNA analyst, Missy Woods, had manipulated data and tampered with evidence in potentially thousands of criminal cases. But the State did not learn of Woods’s malfeasance in 2023. In fact, Woods’s supervisors had been aware of it since 2014. Instead of investigating her fraud and disclosing it to defendants in affected cases, however, the supervisors covered it up and allowed her to continue working on cases—including Daniel Eatinger’s case here—for another decade.   The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, the ACLU of Colorado, and the Exoneration Project filed an amicus brief with the Colorado Supreme Court arguing that Woods and her supervisors violated their constitutional duty to disclose her misconduct, and that the Court should order systemic remedies for the thousands of defendants who have been harmed.

In a case challenging New Hampshire’s school-funding scheme, the State has asked the New Hampshire Supreme Court to overturn decades of precedent recognizing a state constitutional right to an adequate education. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, the ACLU of New Hampshire, and the National Education Association-New Hampshire filed an amicus brief urging the Court to uphold these precedents and preserve the state constitutional right to an adequate education.

WASHINGTON – Following race projection announcements in key campaigns and in races that will determine the control of Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union released the following statement from Chief Political and Advocacy Officer Deirdre Schifeling on the results so far of the 2026 midterm elections: “Tonight, voters sent a clear message to politicians: You work for us. Since the day President Trump took office, his administration and allies have been working overtime to take away voters’ power. But American voters have shown through historic turnout that they’ve had enough of a rigged system designed to work for the people in power instead of for them. “From key state supreme court races in Michigan and North Carolina to state legislative races in Georgia and North Carolina, voters uniformly rejected candidates who threaten abortion rights and our right to vote. Voters also stood up for reproductive freedom in Missouri and Virginia, and permanently secured voting rights and marriage equality in Virginia. “However, our work is only half done, and now a new chapter begins. With a new Congress in Washington and state legislative sessions starting in January, now is our moment to create the representative, accountable democracy we have always deserved and remedy the failures of our system that led us to this point. We must unrig the system and ensure that government is used to make ordinary people’s lives better, not to enrich and entrench those in power.” As part of the ACLU’s “Firewall for Freedom” strategy, the organization and its PAC, ACLU Voter Education Fund, made their largest-ever commitment in down ballot races, spending $25.5 million across underfunded but critical state-level campaigns with an outsized impact on our rights and freedoms, from key ballot initiatives to state Supreme Court races, secretaries of state races, and state legislative races.

Section 131 of the newly enacted Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act gives Coloradans a cause of action to seek damages or equitable relief when state or local police officers violate the Colorado Constitution. In 2022, Christopher Mosley sued Officer Brendan Daves for conducting a warrantless search of his car, which Daves argued was lawful under the federal protective sweep doctrine. After Mosley prevailed at trial and the court of appeals affirmed, Daves appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and the ACLU of Colorado filed an amicus brief agreeing with Mosley’s argument that Daves has misapprehended the federal doctrine whilst focusing on a separate point: the Court’s interpretation of Section 131 is not bound by federal law.