SCOTUS Will Decide If Homelessness Can be Punished

NEW YORK – A new report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Policing Project at New York University School of Law finds that the United States’ current approach to traffic safety has failed to reduce roadway deaths, while imposing significant financial and human costs on communities. The report, Safe Roads for All: Evidence-Based Strategies for Keeping Our Roadways Safe, calls for a transformation in road safety policy to one that more effectively advances safety and equity. “Using traffic stops as a policing tool is completely ineffective in terms of reducing crime or advancing public safety, and excessive stops are a true threat to civil rights and liberties,” said Emily Reina Dindial, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “We should not have to choose between safe roads and our constitutional rights, and this report makes clear that there are myriad road safety strategies that achieve both. Lawmakers must commit to these smarter safety strategies.” Each year, more than 40,000 people are killed and more than 2 million injured in preventable car crashes. Despite a growing body of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of common-sense infrastructural and road design measures, traffic safety strategies in this country have largely focused instead on individual enforcement through high-volume police stops and ticketing. The report finds that this approach fails to prevent injuries and deaths from car crashes and in fact puts people at risk of harmful encounters with police. Ticketing practices that prioritize revenue generation over road safety also trap millions of people in inescapable cycles of fines, fees, and debt. "We owe it to our communities to use the most effective and equitable strategies to prioritize safe mobility for all. The ideas in this report can help us get there," said Leah Shahum, Founder and Executive Director of the Vision Zero Network. The report highlights a number of alternative approaches that can more effectively reduce crashes and save lives, such as street design improvements, incentives for vehicular safety and safe driving, thoughtful use of technology, and shifts in police responses to minor traffic issues. “Pretextual traffic enforcement is an outdated political relic from the War on Drugs that doesn't make our roads or our communities any safer,” said Scarlet Neath, Director of Reimagining Public Safety at the Policing Project. “If lawmakers are serious about preventing avoidable traffic deaths, they should prioritize evidence-based policies - like speed reduction policies and smarter roadway design - that have a proven safety impact.” The report offers a roadmap for policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels, including recommendations to: Limit incentives for, and discretion to, conduct non-safety stops Restrict ticketing practices and/or potential revenue from ticketing practices. Reduce speeds and crashes using roadway redesign and speed reduction policies. Pilot models for civilian traffic enforcement. The full report is available at: https://www.aclu.org/documents/safe-roads-for-all

MEMPHIS – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Tennessee filed a motion in the Tennessee Supreme Court today seeking DNA testing that in the case of Tony Carruthers that could prove his innocence. The state plans to execute Mr. Carruthers on May 21 despite unmatched fingerprints and DNA evidence in his case that have never been compared to the most likely alternative suspect identified by Mr. Carruthers’ co-defendant. There has never been any physical evidence linking Mr. Carruthers to the crime and the case against him was built on testimony from jailhouse informants, widely known to be one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. One of the individuals responsible for the murders later stated that Mr. Carruthers was not involved and instead pointed investigators to another man, Ronnie Irving. Finally, within the last two years, the State Attorney finally admitted what it had successfully hid for three decades – that key State witness Alfredo Shaw was a paid career informant prior to, during, and after Mr. Carruthers trial.’ Meanwhile, there is unidentified DNA on evidence found with the victims that does not match Tony Carruthers and has never been compared to Mr. Irving. The motion filed today asks the court to order comparison of that unknown DNA to Irving and to permit testing of three additional items that have never been analyzed. These items were all found with the victims’ bodies and are likely to contain evidence pointing to the person who is actually responsible for the crime. “Before the state carries out an irreversible punishment, it must answer the most basic question: did they get the right person?” said Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. “Tennessee has the forensic evidence that could help answer that question, and they must test it before it is too late. There is no justification for barreling towards an execution while DNA evidence that could prove who really committed this crime remains untested.” In addition to the DNA evidence, there are five fingerprints recovered from the crime scene that do not match Mr. Carruthers and remain unidentified. A separate motion seeking fingerprint testing that Mr. Carruthers filed pro se in September 2021 is still pending before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals at Jackson. Mr. Carruthers was forced to represent himself at trial after the court became frustrated with his repeated dismissal of appointed counsel, which was exclusively due to his longstanding and well-documented mental illness. He did not ask to represent himself and instead repeatedly requested an attorney. His self-representation was found to be so prejudicial to his co-defendant James Montgomery, entitling Mr. Montgomery to a new trial. Mr. Montgomery, who was initially sentenced to death was allowed to enter a plea to a reduced charge, sentenced to a term of years, and was released from prison in 2016. If executed, Mr. Carruthers would be the first person in nearly a century to be put to death after being forced to represent himself at trial.

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union sent a public records request this week to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), seeking information related to federal reform efforts with police departments in Memphis, Minneapolis, and Phoenix, that the Trump administration abruptly and prematurely ended last year. The request is part of the ACLU’s Seven States Safety Campaign, an initiative to hold police accountable in jurisdictions where Biden administration investigations found that police engaged in unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing. From 2021 to early 2025, the DOJ documented repeated civil rights violations in cities across the country, including officers using excessive force, targeting people of color, and violating constitutional rights as a matter of practice. In May 2025, the Trump administration rescinded near-final agreements in Minneapolis and Louisville that would have ensured police departments addressed the misconduct uncovered by the DOJ and withdrew findings from investigations in Arizona, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. In doing so, it claimed that the Biden administration’s reports “were based on faulty legal theories, incomplete data and flawed statistical methods,” and it disavowed “dubious legal theories of disparate impact” in police investigations. “Ensuring police are transparent, accountable, and trustworthy has never been more urgent, especially as the Trump administration works to shield police from accountability and let misconduct run rampant,” said Brandon Buskey, director of the Criminal Law Reform Project at the ACLU. “The administration has tried to discredit the findings of these investigations, but it cannot erase the truth. By keeping a spotlight on what federal investigators uncovered, we can hold local officials accountable to the communities they serve and to the Constitution.” The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has historically played a critical role in ensuring police departments comply with the Constitution. The Trump administration has abandoned that responsibility, walking away from sorely needed efforts to remedy documented civil rights violations and declining to open new ones. In many of the same cities where the DOJ previously found unconstitutional policing, the administration has deployed armed and masked federal agents who are using the very tactics federal investigators warned violated individual’s constitutional rights. These new FOIA’s will allow the ACLU to evaluate the validity of the Trump administrations claims about the previous administration’s findings, including whether Trump officials conducted any substantive review of the Biden-era reports before publicly criticizing them.

Despite talk of "drones for good" from boosters, we're seeing a new, darker law enforcement “use case” for the technology